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INTRODUCTORY LECTURES 



OXFORD REFORMERS 



dHoI^tt ^vasmus ^nft ^lori^. 



Delivered in Philadelphia, in 1893, under the auspices of the 

American Society for the Extension of 

University Teaching. 



W. HUDSON SHAW, M.A., 

Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. 



y 



PHII.ADELPHIA : 
The American Society for the Extension of University Teaching, 

1893. 



PRICE, HHV CENTS. 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURES 



OXFORD REFORMERS 



On^I^tt ^ta^tnns atift ^|ot^ 



Delivered in Philadelphia, in 1893, under the auspices of the 

American Society for the Extension of 

University Teaching. 



Wi HUDSON SHAW, M.A., 

Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. 



PHir^ADElvPHIA : 
The American Society for the Extension of University Teaching, 

1893. 



'So"" 



Copyright, 1893, by 
The American Society for the Extension of University Teaching. 



GIFT 

MRS. WOODROW Wi'LSOa 

WOV. 23, 1939 



LECTURE I, 



3of|n Col^t. 



" A good man was ther of religioun. 
And was a poor Persoun of a toun ; 
But riche he was of holy thought and werk. 
He was also a lerned man, a clerk 
That Crides gospel gladly wolde preche ; 
His parischens devoutly wolde he teche. 

This noble ensample unto his scheep he gaf 

That f erst he wroughte, and after that he taughte : 

Out of the gospel he the wordes caughte, 

And this figure he addid yit thereto^ 

That if gold rtiste, what schude yren doo ? 

A bettre preest I trowe ther nowher non is. 
He wayteed after no pompe ne reverence, 
Ne maked him a spiced conscience. 
But Christes lore, and his Apostles twelve, 
He taught, and f erst he folwed it himselve.^' 

— Chaucer's Prologue. 

" The awakening of a rational Christianity^ whether in England or in the 
Teutonic world at large, begins with the Florentine studies of John Colet. 
From the first it was manifest that the revival of Letters would take a tone in 
England very different from the tone it had taken in Italy ^ a tone less literary, 
less largely human, but more moral, more religious, m.ore practical in its 
bearings both upon society and politics. The vigour and earnestness of Colet 
were the best proof of the strength with which the new m,ovem.ent was to affect 
English religion . ... It was his resolve to fling aside the traditional dogmas 
of his day and to discover a rational and practical religion in the Gospels 
themselves, which gave its peculiar stamp to the theology of the Renascence. 
Hs faith stood simply on a vivid realization of the person of Christ. In the 
prominence which such a view gave to the moral life, in his free criticism of 
the earlier Scriptures, in his tendency to simple forms of doctrine and con- 
fessions of faith, Colet struck the key-note of a mode of religious thought as 
strongly in contrast with that of the later Reformation as with that of 
Catholicism itself^'' — J. R, Green. 



LECTURE I. 



AT the outset of these three lectures on the Oxford Keformers 
of the early sixteenth century, it may be well, perhaps, 
that I should indicate their scope and intention, and explain 
why I think your time will not be altogether wasted in exam- 
ining the life-histories of such men as John Colet, Erasmus 
and Sir Thomas More. It will be my fault surely, and not due to 
the nature of the subject itself, if you do not recognize in the records 
of these three lives one of the most interesting and stimulating 
portions of English history. It is true enough that from the point 
of view of those historians who care only for war and poh'tics, for 
the doings of kings and statesmen and diplomatists, these Oxford 
scholars played a very unimportant part in the world, and are 
scarcely worthy of notice. They never slew anybody, or gained 
advantages over their foes by judicious lying, or stole territory 
that did not belong to them. Moreover, if Professor Seeley is 
right when he says that history is concerned only with the 
development of States and has nothing to do with individuals 
except in their capacity of members of a State, then certainly 
Colet and Erasmus and More have no special claim upon the 
attention of historical students. We had better inquire into more 
important matters, such as the wars of Henry VIIL, in France, or 
the intricacies of Cardinal Wolsey's foreign policy. But those of 
us who have been unfortunate enough to receive our training in 
Oxford, that antiquated and Old-world University, that home of lost 
causes and exploded ideas, who acknowledge as our master in his- 
tory, John Richard Green, and sympathize alike with the scorn 
which he showered upon " drum-and-trumpet" theories of historical 
writing, and his daring heretical attempt to set the figures of the 



6 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

poet and the philosopher, the merchant and the missionary and 
the discoverer, in places of equal honour with those occupied by- 
princes and warriors, cannot consent to see history narrowed down 
to a mere branch of politics. It is very improper, no doubt, 
but I feel certain that the majority of those here present, who 
care for the study as it bears upon human lives and not as a 
means of passing an examination or obtaining a degree, find 
much more genuine interest in the history of ideas and great 
movements than in the history of wars and treaties and faction 
fights. You would rather solve the problems of the Kenaissance 
than know accurately all the intrigues and diplomatic schemuigs 
of the eighteenth century. The Hundred Years' War of England 
against France, and the exploits of tinsel heroes like Edward III. 
and the Black Prince have become inexpressibly wearisome to 
you. Like Macaulay's criminal, who preferred the galleys for life 
to the enforced reading of Guicciardini's History, you would 
rather endure many woes than be condemned for long to the Wars 
of the Roses. Wyclifie and More, Lord Bacon, Raleigh and 
John Milton, the men of ideas, are more attractive to you than 
innumerable brave and stupid fighting barons of feudal times. 
K this be so, — if there seem to you greater utility in studying the 
lives of thinkers and scholars who have powerfully influenced the 
thought of their race, its religion and its morals, than in busying 
yourselves perpetually about battles and sieges and the doings of 
selfish conquerors and ravagers, — then these Reformers of four 
centuries ago will possess for you a strong and powerfiil attrac- 
tiveness. 

For, in the first place, all three of them were good men as well 
as great. One hears it said often enough that history is chiefly a 
record of crimes and cruel deeds, of tyrannies and rebellions, of 
falseness and turpitude ; and that the more deeply read people 
are in the fife of the past the less belief they have in mankind. 
Certainly if the moral sense has not been dulled by hard experience 
of evil, if the conscience is still sensitive and delicate, there is 
pain enough in human records. A life like Henry VIII.'s, or 
Pope Alexander VI.'s, or Charles II.'s, a book like Machiavelli's 
' Prince,' a self-revelation like the autobiography of Benvenuto 



JOHN CO LET. 7 

Cellini or Rousseau, is a hideous nightmare to most of us, which 
we would gladly forget if we could. We turn with a sense of 
reUef to the biographies of men like these of whom I have to 
speak, who, hving in a corrupt and immoral time, in that transitional 
epoch when the Middle Ages were dying and the New World 
which we know had scarcely come into being, demand little of 
that charity which historians find it necessary to accord to great 
men of the past. Emphatically, whatever may have been their 
faults, Colet and Erasmus and More were, for their generation, 
the very salt of the earth. It has been claimed for John Colet, 
who died before the Reformation had fully come to the birth^ 
that he was the founder of that rational Christianity which the 
Teutonic races have in the main accepted. He was also our 
English Savonarola, scarcely inferior to the great Dominican in 
courage and boldness, a preacher of righteousness who did not 
flinch from denouncing the mad war-schemes of an ambitious 
king or from exposing the worldliness and corruption of the order 
to which he belonged, — in his own manner of life pure and 
blameless amid almost universal degradation. Erasmus was not 
only the most brilliant man of letters of his age, the recognized 
leader of the scholars of Europe, the Catholic who helped to 
make possible the success of Luther by his merciless denunciations 
of monks and clergy ; but he was also a man, who in spite of 
some lamentable failings, wins our admiration by his large-minded- 
ness, by his single-hearted devotion to learning, his scorn of low 
ambitions, his hatred of war and tyranny and cruelty, his genuine 
piety and love of goodness. As for Sir Thomas More, it is 
difficult to speak of him in words which will not seem to you 
strained and exaggerated. Against him history has one charge 
to bring and only one. For the rest, it seems to many of us that 
his is absolutely the most perfect and lovable character in English 
annals, King Alfred's not excepted. A man of vast intellect 
and powers, yet of exquisite simplicity : a despiser of pomp 
and luxury, yet devoted to culture and refinement : courted by 
kings and princes, yet happy only in his home with his children : 
the first thinker of modern times, who yearned with passionate 
longing to ameliorate the lot of the toilers of the world: 



8 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

More laid down his life at last cheerfiilly, and in the spirit of a 
hero and a martyr, for a cause which he judged to be just and 
right, and which was in truth the cause of English liberty. He 
was recognized then, and he is recognized now by all historians 
who are not blinded by religious passion, as the noblest English- 
man of the sixteenth century. 

Secondly, the study of those three lives will bring you face to 
face with that great intellectual movement of Italy which has 
revolutionized human existence, — that Eevival of Letters which 
may rightly be regarded as the most important change in the 
history of Europe which has occurred since the fall of the Roman 
Empire. We of Anglo-Saxon descent are naturally anxious to know 
how the Kenaissance affected our own race, what influence it had 
upon the Reformation, in what ways it differed from the Renaissance 
iu Italy. The answers to these questions can best be found in the 
lives and works of the Oxford Reformers. Colet, Erasmus, and 
More, with their friends Archbishop Warham, William Grocyn, 
William Lilly, and Thomas Linacre, were the first leaders of the 
English Revival of Learning. Through their instrumentality, 
Florence, the intellectual centre of Europe, the famous city which 
has effected for the modem world what Athens did for the 
ancient, brought her inflaence to bear upon Oxford, and from 
Oxford the new light was spread over the rest of England. But 
in the hands of these scholars of Teutonic blood, the Renaissance 
was strangely modified, and modified in a way that all Englishmen 
have reason to be thankful for. Contact with ancient literature 
made them rebels against mediseval religion and thought, but not 
against Christianity itself They were untouched by the Paganism 
of the Italian scholars. We cannot imagine John Colet listening 
mth pleasure, as Lorenzo de Medici did, to a satire upon immor- 
tality, or Erasmus refraining, like Cardinal Bembo, from reading 
S. Paul's Epistles, lest their bad Greek should corrupt his style. 
" The Revival of Letters in England," it has been weU said, " took 
a tone far different from that which it had taken in Italy, less 
literary, less largely human, but more moral, more religious, more 
practical in its bearings both upon society and politics." Nothing 
is more striking than the manner in which the healthy Euglish 



JOHN CO LET. 9 

conscience assimilated what was good in the Italian movement 
and rejected the evil. Great as was the enthusiasm of the Oxford 
scholars for the New Learning, they valued it chiefly as a means 
to a noble end. Colet learnt Greek in order that he might cast 
away the fetters of the schoolmen and find in the original docu- 
ments of Christianity a simpler and purer faith. Erasmus loved 
culture with boundless enthusiasm, but he used all his learning and 
scholarship to bring about reform of the Church and nobler views of 
life. Sir Thomas More, like Machiavelli, wrote a treatise on govern- 
ment and politics, but his free thought produced not a libel upon 
humanity and a picture of hopeless degradation, but a generous 
vision of future progress and an exalted scheme of ethics. In fact, 
the moral element in our EngHsh Revival was the predominant 
one. Colet inveighs against corruption and selfishness in high 
places. Erasmus lashes the laziness of monks and the tyranny 
of kings. More dares to dream of a time when poverty and 
misery shall have vanished from the earth, and obedience to the 
laws of Christ shall have brought about a veritable kingdom of 
God amongst men. 

And thirdly, we have an additional source of interest in the fact 
that we have to deal with the epoch of the Reformation, — of the 
" Lutheran tragedy/' as Erasmus called it. In that tragedy these 
men played their parts. The Reformation saddened and gloomed 
the last days of Erasmus and obscured his fame ; it brought More 
to the scaffold in the prime of life. In a certain sense they had 
prepared the way for Luther, and were precursors of the Reforma- 
tion ; nor were the monks altogether wrong who complained that 
Erasmus had laid the ^gg which Luther hatched. But the Oxford 
Reformers were no Protestants. Their chief importance in history 
is to be found in this, that they had given to the world an alterna- 
tive scheme for a reform of the Church by quiet, gradual methods, 
without a revolution. They failed. Luther succeeded. He 
destroyed the abuses and corruptions of the Church, but the price 
paid was the sacrifice of the unity of Christendom, and from his 
day to our own the interminable warfare of the sects has retarded 
progress and brought shame upon Christianity. On the whole, 
most of us in England and America, in spite of the great reaction 



lo THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

in favour of Medisevalism which the last half century has witnessed, 
in spite of the attitude taken up by a very considerable body of 
our countrymen who repudiate with scorn the name of Protestant, 
most of us think that Religious Liberty was worth any sacrifice of 
unity. But we cannot help wondering sometimes, when we reflect 
upon the hostihties which the Reformation has caused — the rehg- 
ious wars, the social strifes, the suicidal competition of sects, the 
narrowness and the intense individualism to which Protestantism 
is prone, the multiphcation of factions and discords, perpetuated 
ahke in life and in death between brother-men, between friends 
and kinsmen — whether Goethe was right when he declared that it 
would have been well for the world if Erasmus and not Luther 
had guided the Reforming movement. Nay, furthermore, there 
are not wanting wise teachers in our midst who warn us that there 
is a Protestant scholasticism as well as a Catholic. If Luther, they 
say, with his dogma of Justification by Faith, and Calvin with his 
dogma of Predestination, have triumphed in the past, the future 
belongs to Erasmus, who sought to diminish dogma, who insisted 
on the final supremacy of Reason, and strove hard to draw man- 
kind from the discussion of insoluble mysteries to practical piety 
and the imitation of Christ. Certainly if one may judge by the 
present tone of theology — if, still more, we inquire into the beliefs 
of average educated EngHsh laymen, we shall be forced to the 
conclusion that the world is becoming, as it once was before, 
Erasmian. In any case, a pathetic interest attaches to the vain 
attempts of great and good men like More and Erasmus to preserve 
the continuity of History, and to hand down to posterity, reformed 
but not destroyed, the Church of Western Christendom. 

There is not much difficulty in indicating the characteristics of 
this trio of Reformers and their relations to each other. Colet is 
primarily a preacher and theologian. Erasmus, once a monk, 
is essentially a scholar and man of letters. More, by profession 
a lawyer and a statesman, is the original thinker and daring 
speculator, with gifts of genius far exceeding those of his two 
friends. We know least about Colet ; but it seems probable that 
Erasmus derived much of his theology from him, and More many 
of his ideas on politics and society. Colet, though born in the 



JOHN COLET. II 

same year as Erasmus, 1466, is acknowledged by him as his 
master and teacher ; but the genius and intellectual power of 
More seem to have altogether neutralized his twelve years of 
inferiority in age. To mark the epoch it may be well to bear in 
mind that when Colet was born, the Wars of the Eoses were still 
distracting England, and that when he died Luther was just about 
to break with Rome. We have to deal with the age of the 
Medici and the Borgias, of Richard III. and Henry YIII., of 
Columbus and Savonarola, of Luther and Ignatius Loyola, of 
Thomas Cromwell and Machiavelli — an age you will remember, 
distinguished beyond most others by its portentous wickedness 
and moral degradation.- 

John Colet was the son of Sir Henry Colet, a rich and prosper- 
ous mercer who became Lord Mayor of London in the year fol- 
lowing the battle of Bosworth. He was the first-born of a large 
family of twenty-one sons and daughters, none of whom save him- 
self lived beyond childhood. He was educated at one of the few 
famous schools which London then possessed, S. Anthony's, 
where one may hope there was more instruction and less flogging 
than was usual in fifteenth-century schools, which, if Erasmus 
may be trusted, stood as much in need of reform as any institu- 
tions of Christendom. " At the present time," he writes in one of 
his tracts, " all public instruction has passed into the hands of 
schoolmasters. And though there ought to have been the greatest 
care in appointing them, those assigned to the post are, as a rule» 
a shabby, broken-down set of men, sometimes hardly in their 
senses. So mean the place, so miserable the pittance, you would 
say the pigs were being reared there, and not that respectable 
people's children were being taught." History commemorates 
Dean Colet's name if for nothing else, for this, that bef )re he 
died he had begun a revolution in middle-class education of which 
the beneficial results have endured to our own day. 

At the age of seventeen he was a student at Oxford ; and it is worth 
our while perhaps to try to realize what the University was like 
when Richard III. was king, in the last dying epoch of the Middle 
Ages. Outwardly it was not at all the Oxford of to-day. John 
Colet as he journeyed from London would pass over no beautiful 



12 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

many-arched Magdalen bridge. That, of course, is a mere 
creature of yesterday, barely a hundred and ten years old. He would 
see Magdalen but without its tower, of which the first stone was not 
laid until 1492, and without its groves, which date from the reign 
of Elizabeth. Half of the colleges which are familiar to us were 
then absent. Christ Church, the magnificent creation of Wolsey, 
did not come into existence until 1525. There was no Corpus, 
no Brasenose, no S. John's or Trinity, still less such modern 
growths as Wadham and Worcester. But Colet would know 
Merton and BalHol, the two oldest foundations ; and the vener- 
able University College, which is not so venerable, however, as 
some persons would have us believe. He would see Queen's and 
New College, Exeter, Oriel, Lincoln and All Souls. The Bod- 
leian Library as we know it belongs of course to a later century, but 
the Divinity School, when Colet arrived in Oxford, was fresh from 
the hands of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester's workmen ; and it is 
a safe conjecture that he must often have listened there, probably 
not without scorn and anger, to the disputations of scholastic 
divines and the wordy Avarfare of Thomists and Scotists. The chief 
feature, however, of mediaeval Oxford was the existence of numer- 
ous establishments belonging to the monastic orders. It was still 
almost a city of monks and friars. The Benedictines had their 
hostels on the site of Worcester ; the Dominicans had their home 
in S. Ebbe's ; Carmehties, Minorites, and Cistercians thronged the 
streets ; S. Frideswide's nunnery had given place to a priory of 
Augustinians, who also possessed a College for their student 
canons near New Inn Lane, where Erasmus was hospitably 
received when he first came to Oxford in 1498. 

As to the life of the students, what most strikes us is their 
poverty and the hardships of their lot. Oxford was not then the 
exclusive possession of a small wealthy class. It was the home of 
poor students, who lived on hard fare, in squalid tenements, need- 
ing constantly the attention of rat-catchei-s in their straw-littered 
dormitories, forced from time to time to deposit in pawn in the 
University chests some article of value in order to obtain a meal, 
possessing few books and scanty furniture, finding almost their 
sole means of recreation and athletic exercise in street brawls with 



JOHN CO LET. 13 

townsmen, living chiefly by mendicancy. Mediaeval poems 
constantly allude to the begging of undergraduates on their way 
to the University, and late in the reign of Henry VIII. measures 
were taken to keep the practice within bounds. " Be it enacted," 
says a statute of the realm, " that scholars of the Universities of 
Oxford and Cambridge that go about begging, not being authorized 
under the seal of the said Universities by the Chancellor or Vice- 
Chancellor of the same, shall be punished as is before rehearsed of 
sturdy beggars and vagabonds." 

We need not, however, despise these mediaeval students. Their 
poverty may perhaps raise in our minds certain inconvenient 
doubts as to whether the endowments of the ancient Universities 
have not been diverted in many cases from the classes for whom 
they were originally intended and who stand most in need of 
them. At any rate, we may be sure that the zeal for learning 
displayed by those tattered gownsmen of the Middle Ages, who 
often as not begged their food, was at least as great as that 
displayed by their modern successors. Perhaps they cared for 
knowledge more than we do. "In the chilly squalor of 
uncarpeted aad unwarmed chambers," says a recent historian of 
Oxford, the Warden of Merton, " by the light of narrow and 
unglazed casements, or the gleam of flickering oil-lamps, poring 
over dusky manuscripts hardly to be deciphered by modern 
eyesight, men of humble birth, and dependent on charity for a 
bare subsistence, but with a noble self-confidence transcending 
that of Bacon and Newton, thought out and copied out those 
subtle masterpieces of mediaeval lore, purporting to unveil the 
hidden laws of Nature as well as the dark counsels of Providence 
and the secrets of human destiny." 

What exactly Colet studied when he came to Oxford is a little 
difficult to explain, for the Revival of Learning has placed an 
impassable gulf between the knowledge of that day and of ours. 
The jargon of the Schoolmen has become unintelligible to us. 
We can understand the studies of a Roger Ascham or a Queen 
Elizabeth — Homer and Demosthenes and the Greek Testament, 
— for to a large extent our training is the same ; but which of us, 
I wonder, can boast of an intimate acquaintance with the books 



14 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

which Colet must have read for his degree, — Priscian's Grammar, 
the treatises of Boethius on Arithmetic and Music, the " Nova 
Rhetorica" of Cicero, the "De Interpretatione " of Aristotle? 
There is only one work, in fact, on the list which is common to 
the educational training of that day and our own, and this is 
EucHd's Elements. When Colet arrived in Oxford the University 
had not emerged from the intellectual mists of the Middle Vges. 
In Italy the Revival of Learning had been in full progress for half 
a century or more, but England was still practically untouched by 
it. Exiles from Constantinople as early as 1441 had lectured in 
Florence on the Greek classics. Cosimo de Medici, shortly before 
his death in 1464, had founded the Platonic Academy ; but bar- 
barian England lagged behind, and it is extremely doubtful 
whether, when Colet first came to Oxford, there was a man in the 
University, — Master, Doctor, or Vice-Chancellor, — who could 
translate Greek into English. We can have no more striking illus- 
tration of the backwardness of England in culture and civilization 
than the fact that a brother of the Black Prince once banqueted 
with Petrarch, the first of the Italian Humanists, in the palace 
of Galeazzo Visconti ; that is to say, while England was still feudal 
and mediaeval, Italy, as Mr. J. H. Symonds tells us, " socially 
and mentally, had entered upon the modern era." 

Already, however, a stray scholar or two from Oxford had 
found his way to the Italian Universities and had imbibed the gifts 
of that New Learning which was destined so quickly to transform 
the life of Europe. Amongst the first of these was Thomas 
Linacre, a Fellow of All Souls, the celebrated founder of the 
College of Physicians, who, about the same time when Colet 
arrived in Oxford, was receiving the highest education the world 
could give, in company with Lorenzo de Medici's children at 
Florence. To Florence also was drawn, as to the source of 
knowledge and scholarship, another Oxford Fellow, William 
Grocyn, who studied under the great ItaHan humanist Politian, 
and returning here, publicly taught the Greek language, much to 
the pain of certain orthodox divines who regarded it as a Pagan 
and heretical tongue. To William Grocyn belongs the credit of 
having opened the treasures of the New Learning to two of the 



JOHN CO LET. J 5 

most famous scholars of the next generation, Erasmus and Sir 
Thomas More. 

The third channel of communication between Italy and Eng- 
land was Colet himself He left Oxford in 1494, and spent the 
next two years in Italy " like a merchant," as Erasmus writes, 
"seeking goodly pearls." Unfortunately, we have no detailed 
information regarding his life in Italy, nor do we know absolutely 
that he visited Florence. The indirect evidence that he did so, 
nevertheless, seems altogether convincing. The intellectual pre- 
dominance of Florence was at this period so marked that no 
traveling scholar in search of knowledge could possibly have 
avoided the fair city on the Arno where the greatest scholars and 
men of letters and artists of the world had their home. Colet's 
sermons and lectures bear the clearest marks of the influence 
of three men, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Girolamo 
Savonarola, all Florentines, If Colet ever reached Florence at 
all, and it is incredible that he did not, he must have come 
directly into contact with the Prior of San Marco, at that time 
the central figure in Florence. It is allowable to think of the 
young Oxford student listening, with the artists Botticelli and 
Michel Angelo, with historians like Machiavelli and Guicciardini, 
with the most learned scholars and the humblest poor of 
Florence, to the fiery words of Italy's most powerful preacher 
as he stood beneath the dome of Brunelleschi, denouncing the 
corruptions of the Church and the evil lives of Popes and 
prelates. This, of course, is mere guess work. But at any rate 
it is beyond doubt that John Colet, first leader of the English 
Renaissance, whether or not he ever saw Savonarola, is Savon- 
arola's spiritual disciple. You cannot read the sermons of the 
two men without being struck by their close and intimate 
resemblance. Their principles are identical — reform without 
revolution, loyalty to the idea of the Catholic Church, unrelenting 
warfare ahke against worldly ecclesiastics and selfish, ambitious 
tyrants, devotion to the Scriptures, Puritan morality. 

The only historical evidence that we possess regarding this 
Italian visit of Colet's is contained in the words of Erasmus. 
" Colet devoted himself," he says, " at this time entirely to the 



1 6 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

study of the sacred writers." The sentence is significant, and 
indicates the course which the Revival of Letters was to take 
in Germany and England, where Renaissance meant Reforma- 
tion — not a return to Paganism, but a return to Scriptural 
Christianity. We should naturally have expected that in the 
chosen home of the Classical Revival, Colet would have studied 
chiefly, not S. Paul, but Plato and Cicero. Perhaps if he had 
reached Italy five years earlier, when Lorenzo de Medici was 
alive, when the enthusiasm for ancient civilization was at its 
height, when Marsilio Ficino, it was said, kept a lamp burning 
before the bust of Plato as well as before the image of the Virgin, 
he too might have imbibed the sympathies of the Italian 
Humanists. But he came to Italy during the epoch of the 
reaction. Lorenzo was dead. Savonarola was all-powerfiil. The 
reign of Pagan license was over for the time. Scorn was being 
cast by the fervid monk upon all attempts to exalt the ancient 
philosophers above the Christian writers as guides of life. The 
Bible, and the Bible only, was preached from Savonarola's pulpit. 
And so it came about that when Colet returned to Oxford in 
1496, fresh from contact with Italian learning, he began at once 
to lecture, not upon the works of any classical author, but upon 
S. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. His lectures mark an era in the 
history of religious thought in England. Colet was an unauthor- 
ized teacher and had taken no degree in Divinity, but his fresh and 
original treatment of the Scriptures drew all Oxford, abbots and 
heads of houses included, to his lecture roomi. He was fiercely 
in earnest, and disdained to receive fees from his hearers. " The 
race for professorships and fees," he told Erasmus, " spoilt every- 
thing, and adulterated the purity of all branches of learning." 

By a fortunate accident, the manuscripts of these lectures have 
been preserved at Cambridge, and we can know accurately what 
Colet's rehgious position was. In the first place, he was the 
deadly foe of the Schoolmen and their absurd, complicated 
i^ethods of Scriptural interpretation. He did not, as some are 
inclined to do in modern times, underrate the intellectual power 
of such masters of subtle reasoning as S. Thomas Aquinas ; but 
his Italian studies had brought him face to face with the New 



JOHN CO LET. 17 

Testament, and the Kenaissance spirit of free thought had made 
him a rebel against a system of complicated beliefs and dogmatic 
teachings resting upon no surer basis than a false and artificial 
Scriptural interpretation. The Schoolmen treated the Bible as 
a mere arsenal of texts. They despised its plain and literal 
meaning, and insisted on finding types and allegories in the 
simplest details. "They divide the Scripture," says William 
Tyndale, "into four senses — the literal, tropological, allegorical, 
and anagogical : the literal sense has become nothing at all. 
Twenty doctors expound one text twenty ways, and with an 
antitheme of half an inch some of them draw a thread of nine 
days long. They not only say that the literal sense profiteth 
nothing, but also that it is noisome and hurtful and killeth the 
soul. And this they prove by a text of Paul : ' The letter killeth, 
but the spirit giveth life.' Lo ! they say, the literal sense killeth, 
but the spirit giveth life." 

Against all this Colet made incessant war. It is his great claim 
to our respect that though he lived in the last years of the Middle 
Age, though he was a loyal Catholic, he yet rejected the teaching of 
the scholastic divines, brushed aside their inventions and traditions, 
and went back to the words and life of Christ. He would have 
nothing to do with S. Thomas Aquinas and his brief compendium 
of doctrines to be believed extending to 1150 huge folio pages, 
containing, although the great doctor called his book " milk for 
babes," forty-three separate propositions concerning the nature 
of God, ten propositions regarding the Creation, forty-five respect- 
ing the nature of Man before and after the Fall, and treating as 
not unimportant the discussion of such articles of faith as these : 
Whether an angel can be in more than one place at one and the 
same time? Whether more angels than one can be in one and the 
same place at the same time? Whether angels have local motion? 
and a thousand similar inanities. 

It is no wonder surely that the young Dutch scholar Erasmus, 
brought under the influence of the scholastic divines at the 
University of Paris, came to distrust theology. He dared not 
study it, he said. If he did, he should soon be branded as a 
heretic. The time had come when men were to be freed from 



1 8 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

mediaeval burdens. " Keep firmly to the Bible and tbe Apostles' 
Creed," was John Colet's advice to his pupils : " let divines, if 
they like, dispute about the rest." 

We must not suppose, however, that he had entirely freed 
himself from the theological trammels of his time. Colet, intel- 
lectual child of the Kenaissance though he was, amazing as was 
the boldness with which he anticipated many of the conclusions 
of modern religious thought, had, nevertheless, one foot in the 
Middle Ages. N'o Protestant could have poured greater contempt 
upon image-worship and pilgrimages than he did, but his temper 
was ascetic and monastic. He had httle of the humanist spirit 
which appears in all the writings of Erasmus and in More's 
' Utopia.' The Paganism of the Itahan scholars had forced him, 
as it compelled Savonarola, to adopt narrow and illiberal opinions 
regarding the classical authors. It does not appear to have been 
generally noticed that when he founded S. Paul's School, he 
omitted the study of Cicero and Virgil, Demosthenes and Plato ^ 
and enjoined the reading only of such writers as "hath with 
Tvisdom joined the pure chaste eloquence," such as the fourth 
century author, Lactantius, who together with good Latinity 
combined decent Christian morals. We should be glad to forget 
that a Reformer so generally broad-minded as Colet once advised 
his hearers at Oxford : " Those books only ought to be read in 
which there is a salutary flavour of Christ — in which Christ is set 
forth for us to feast upon. Do not become readers of philosophers, 
companions of devils." /He was a medisevalist too in his views on 
marriage, which he regarded as an inferior state, as a concession 
to human infirmities. When it was objected to him that if his 
doctrines were adopted by Christians, the race of men would soon 
become extinct and the Church be left without members, he only 
pointed to the heathen as materials for grace. If they all became 
Christians and remained single, then, he thought, the human race 
would come to an end in a state of sanctity, and so much the 
better. But, he added, with a touch of caustic humour, there 
was no fear of such a result. The heathen might be converted 
to Christianity, but just as fast professing Christians would relapse 
into practical heathenism. 



JOHN CO LET. tq^ 

In these extreme opinions of his, we haVe Colet at his worst. 
He is at his best and strongest when he leads the way to a rational 
interpretation of the Bible. His greatness as a theologian is not 
to be estimated by his own writings, but by the influence which he 
exercised over his friends. He taught Erasmus what Erasmus 
afterwards taught the world. He helped to make More what 
he was — the boldest thinker and the most perfect man of his- 
generation. 

John Colet, however, was greater as a preacher than as a 
theologian, and it is his work as Dean of S. Paul's which chiefly 
merits attention. His lectures at Oxford brought him into" 
contact with many who influenced the future life of England ; 
possibly with Wolsey, who in 1498 was a tutor in Magdalen 
School ; possibly with William Tyndale, who was then an under- 
graduate of Magdalen Hall ; certainly with Erasmus, who had 
been introduced to him in the same year, 1498. But Oxford was 
still in bonds to the Schoolmen, looked with suspicion upon 
new movements, and shewed no favour to the young scholar who 
treated the Bible not as an armoury of texts, but as a literature, 
as a Divine record indeed, but also as a book to be interpreted 
like any other book. To the end of his stay in Oxford, Colet was 
a mere free lance, unhonoured by his University, obliged to wait 
patiently for an opportunity of advancing those great reforms in 
Church and State for which he longed. 

In the year 1505, the opportunity came, when he was made 
Dean of S. Paul's by King Henry VII. It was a position of great 
usefulness but of peculiar difficulty. The Bishop belonged to 
the school of thought which was passing away, and from the 
first regarded Colet as little better than a heretic. The Chapter 
was corrupt, and demoralized by the ceaseless stream of wealth 
which poured into its coffers from the offerings of the CathedraL 
Colet, like Savonarola, thought that those whose duty it was to 
preach " Blessed are ye poor," had better not possess enormous 
revenues and live like princes. He thought that the Church stood 
in imminent danger of ruin from the worldly Hves of prelates, fromi 
the abuses and scandals of ecclesiastical administration, which 
had brought the clergy into universal contempt with honest men. 



io THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

" How much greediness and appetite of honuur and dignity," he 
boldly told Convocation in 1512, " is nowadays in men of the 
Church! How run they, yea almost out of breath, from one 
benefice to another : from the less to the more, from the lower to 
the higher! Who seeth not this? Who seeing this sorroweth 
not ? Moreover, these that are in the same dignities, the most 
part of them doth go with so stately a countenance, and with so 
high looks, that they seem not to be put in the humble bishopric 
of Christ, but rather in the high lordship and power of the world." 
Such a man as this was not likely to find the Deanery of S. Paul's 
in the early sixteenth century a bed of roses, nor did he. Like 
Abbot Samson of S. Edmund's monastery, in Carlyle's famous 
sketch, Colet had a sore time of it after his elevation to high 
ofiice. He attempted to reform his Chapter, and failed. The 
greed and covetousness of the Canons were inveterate, and Colet's 
reforming zeal was conquered by their dogged resistance. 

He was more successful in making his Cathedral pulpit a centre 
of influence. For twenty years he had been steadily preparing 
himself for the work of a preacher, and had studied carefully, as 
Erasmus tells us, the works of English poets in order that he might 
speak to the hearts of the people. He had listened, in all proba- 
bility, to the sermons of Savonarola, and at any rate was animated 
by the same glowing earnestness and lofty ambition to cleanse the 
Church and stem the torrent of corruption which threatened to 
engulf it in disaster. No such preaching as Colet's, it may be 
safely asserted, had been heard in England for a hundred years. 
In him the spirit of Hugh of Lincoln, Avho withstood kings like 
Richard Lionheart and John Lackland, of Robert Grosseteste, 
who toiled laboriously to root out abuses and to reform the 
Church, lived again. Not even Savonarola himself displayed 
more fearless courage in denouncing powerful offenders and boldly 
attacking flagrant crimes of princes and prelates. In the year 1512, 
the Dean of S. Paul's was caUed upon by Archbishop Warham 
the firm friend of the New Learning and its advocates, to preach 
before Convocation, and his sermon, it has been rightly said by 
Colet's most recent biographer, Mr. Lupton, " marks an epoch in 
the history of the English Church. More truly than any other 



JOHN COLET. 21 

single speech or act, it deserves to be called the overture in the 
great drama of the English Reformation." The Convocation of 
1512 was not an inspiring audience for an earnest, pure-hearted 
Church Reformer to look upon. No wise historical student trusts 
any longer the partisan histories of the Reformation which our 
grandfathers received as veracious ; but when all allowance has 
been made for Protestant exaggerations, the case against the pre- 
Reformation clergy remains overwhelmingly strong. Colet's Con- 
vocation audience would contain many prelates of the type of 
Wolsey, then Dean of Lincoln, and Henry VIII. 's most trusted 
minister, scheming politicians rather than rulers of the Church, as 
worldly as Wolsey but without his genius. There would be some, 
no doubt, of the same stamp as the young boy, shallow-brained, 
but of noble family, whom Erasmus once declined to cram for a 
Bishopric ; some like the illiterate Bishop whom Sir Thomas More 
satirized in a stinging epigram, one of the ignorant opponents of 
the Revival of Letters, who defended the allegorical interpreta- 
tions of the Schoolmen by the usual text, " The letter killeth, but 
the spirit giveth life," and drew down upon himself More's laugh- 
ing retort that he was " too illiterate for any letters to have killed 
him, and if they had, he had no spirit to bring him to life again." 
Half the prelates whom Colet had to address had received their 
promotion, not through any especial holiness of life or fitness for 
their offices, but purely on account of political services rendered to 
the crown. Not a few of the Bishops were foreigners and lived 
abroad. Some were thoroughly bad men, hke James Stanley, a 
connection of the Royal family, and a member of a noble house, 
who in 1506 was pitchforked into a Bishopric, and soon became 
notorious throughout England for the open immorality of his life. 
The Convocation of 1512, it is clear, was not likely to receive with 
acclamation the reforming projects of a Puritan like John Colet* 
It had met together to arrange stronger measures for the extirpa- 
tion of heretics, and Colet told his hearers to their faces tha,t the 
most pernicious heresy of all was the evil and depraved lives of the 
clergy. His opening words struck the keynote of his sermon. 
" You are come together to-day, fathers and right wise men, to 
hold a council. I wish that, mindful of your name and profession, 



22 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

ye would consider of the reformation of ecclesiastical affairs ; for 
never was it more necessary, and never did the state of the Church 
more need your endeavours. For the Church, the spouse of Christ, 
which He wished to be without spot or wrinkle, is become foul 
and deformed." 

The distinguishing mark of the reforming programme of Colet 
and the Oxford Reformers was that it aimed at changes in life and 
practice, not in doctrine. Colet has no word to say against Papal 
Supremacy or the Mass, and there need be no doubt that if he had 
lived he would have been found by the side of Thomas More, 
contending hotly against Luther. But he thunders against the 
worJdiness and pride,the covetousness and luxury and secular occu- 
pations of the prelates of his day. " Magistracy in the Church," 
h^ tells dignitaries like Wolsey, " is nothing else than humble 
service. He who is chief, let him be the servant of all." In the 
ears of scandalous persons Hke James Stanley, Bishop of Ely, he 
describes with unheard-of plainness of speech the immoral lives of 
ecclesiastics. "They give themselves up to feasting and ban- 
queting," he says : " spend themselves in vain babbling, take part 
in sports and plays, devote themselves to hunting and hawking ; 
are drowned in the delights of this world." Worst of all the cor- 
ruptions of the time, however, Colet ranks the race for wealth 
which had infected his order. " What else in these days," he asks 
the astonished Convocation, " do we seek for in the Church than 
rich benefices and promotions ? In these same promotions, what 
else do we count upon but their fruits and revenues? We rush 
after them with such eagerness, that we care not how many and 
what duties or how great benefices we take, if only they have great 
revenues. O Covetousness ! Paul rightly called thee the root of 
all evil. From thee comes all this piling-up of benefices one on the 
top of the other ; from thee quarrels about tithes, about offerings, 
about mortuaries, about ecclesiastical right and title, for which we 
fight as for our very lives. Why should I mention the rest ? Every 
corruption, all the ruin of the Church, all the scandals of the world, 
come from the covetousness of priests." 

And then the fiery Dean of S. Paul's went on to propose his 
remedies. No new laws were wanted, he said. Let the Bishops 



JOHN CO LET. 23 

reform their lives. Let the ecclesiastical courts, which enabled the 
clergy to prey upon the laity, be transformed. Let residence be 
enforced, and wicked and ignorant persons be no longer admitted 
to holy orders. Let the rulers of the Church, instead of posing as 
princes and statesmen, watch over their flocks, hear the causes of 
the poor, sustain the fatherless, and spend their lives in works of 
piety. 

Finally, Colet warned the Convocation, as though foreseeing the 
catastrophe which was impending, that the need for reform was 
urgent. "Consider the miserable state and condition of the 
Church," he concluded, " and bend your whole minds to its 
Reformation. Suffer not, fathers, suffer not this so illustrious 
assembly to break up without result. Suffer not this your con- 
gregation to slip by for nothing. Ye have indeed often been 
assembled. But (if by your leave I may speak the truth) I see 
not what fruit has as yet resulted from assemblies of this kind." 

Colet might as well have preached to the winds. The only 
result of the sermon seems to have been that henceforth the 
Dean of S. Paul's was a marked man. Before the year was out a 
charge of heresy was brought against him by his own Bishop, 
Fitzjames of London, who had been hostile to him from the first. 
The accusations were somewhat frivolous. The first was that he 
had said that images were not to be worshipped; the second, 
that he had denied that the command to Peter, " Feed my lambs," 
had anything to do with Episcopal hospitality. Saint Peter having 
possessed no Episcopal revenues ; the third, that he had reflected 
upon his Bishop for his habit of reading his sermons. Colet 
made no reply to such nonsense, and Archbishop Warham 
indignantly rejected the charges. 

Later on, Colet's enemies found a more serious accusation 
against him. It was an age of unjust and selfish wars, waged 
mainly to satisfy the vanity or ambition of kings. In 1513, Henry 
VIII. had engaged in one of these, and Colet, who hated all war 
with passionate hatred, being called upon to preach a Good Friday 
sermon before the King and his Court, with reckless boldness, 
seized the occasion to denounce the war-fever of his time. " He 
shewed," says Erasmus, " that when wicked men, out of hatred 



24 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

and ambition, fought with and destroyed one another, they fought 
under the banner not of Christ but of the devil. He shewed 
further, how hard a thing it is to die a Christian death on the 
field of battle : how few undertake a war except from hatred or 
ambition ; and urged, in conclusion, that instead of imitating the 
Caesars and Alexanders, the Christian ought rather to follow the 
example of Christ his prince." 

The zeal of Henry's soldiers had been damped by Colet's 
earnest invective, and immediately after the sermon he was 
summoned to an interview with the King. His enemies openly 
rejoiced, and expected his speedy downfall. Henry VIH., 
however, was still generous and noble, and he treated Colet 
with the greatest kindness. "Let every one have his own 
doctor," he said to his courtiers after the interview, " and let 
every one favor his own ; this man is the doctor for me." " And 
so," concludes Erasmus in his account of the matter, " certain 
wolves departed, open-mouthed as the saying is, nor did any one 
from that day forward venture to molest Colet." 

He hved six years after this : long enough to see his teaching 
carried forward and developed by Erasmus in his ' New Testament,' 
and by Sir Thomas More in the ' Utopia' : long enough also to see 
the first begginnings of that second Reforming movement which 
was destined to obscure and destroy his own. He died in 1519» 
" to the great grief of the whole people," as his epitaph relates, 
" by whom, for his integrity of Hfe and divine gift of preaching, 
he was the most beloved of all his time." 

That part of Dean Colet's work for England which met with 
most immediate success, and was distinctively his own, as 
compared with results which were due to his disciples Erasmus and 
More, was his reform of education and the foundation of S. Paul's 
School in London. In an age when schools in England were for 
the most part barbarous and cruel, antiquated in method, devoted 
to barren and useless studies, he founded a great institution 
which became soon a veritable home of the New Learning, supplied 
a model for the succeeding foundations of the Tudor epoch, 
produced John Milton in the seventeenth century, and at the 
present date sends out probably a greater number of famous 



JOHN CO LET. 25 

classical scholars than any other school in England. Colet was 
drawn to this work partly by his hatred of Scholasticism and his 
zeal for the Kevival of Letters, partly by his love of children. 
He lavished on S. Paul's property equivalent to £40,000 of our 
money, and watched over its welfare with unremitting care. 
He was perhaps even more anxious that his students should be 
good men than great scholars, and would cordially have accepted 
the saying of Ruskin in our own time, " Education does not mean 
teaching people to know what they do not know. It means 
teaching them to behave as they do not behave." " My intent by 
this school," he says in the statutes, " is specially to increase the 
knowledge and worshipping of God and our Lord Christ Jesus, 
and good Christian life and manners in the children." The New 
Learning, however, held a predominant place in Colet's new 
scheme. Greek was taught at S. Paul's, greatly to the indignation 
of Bishop Fitzjames and other advocates of the studies that were 
passing away, who denounced Colet's school as a dangerous and 
heretical institution. The best men of the Revival, on the other 
hand, aided him in his work. The first High-master of the 
school was William Lilly, a brilliant scholar, the companion of 
More, who had traveled in Greece and had shared with Grocyn 
and Lin acre the honor of being the first to bring back to 
England knowledge of the Greek language. Erasmus himself 
wrote grammars and text-books for Colet's students. Both he 
and More were quick to see the importance of the new departure, 
and it was indeed a movement of far-reaching consequences. 
" The grammar schools of Edward the Sixth and of Elizabeth," says 
J. R. Green, " in a word, the system of middle-class education which 
by the close of the century had changed the very face of England, 
were the direct results of Colet's foundation of S. Paul's." As for 
the spirit in which he entered upon his work, the best illustration of 
it is to be found in the preface to the Accidence which he wrote 
for his scholars, which remains as a testimony to the gentle, tender 
nature of one who has been called " the first of the Puritans," who 
with all his severity " took a delight," as Erasmus says, " in the 
purity and simplicity of nature that is in children." " I have been 
willing," Colet writes in the introduction to his book, " to speak 



26 THE OXI'ORD REFORMERS. 

the things often before spoken in such manner as gladly young 
beginners and tender wits might take and conceive. Wherefore, 
I pray you, all little babies, all little children, learn gladly this 
little treatise, and commend it diligently unto your memories. 
Trusting of this beginning that ye shall proceed and grow to per- 
fect literature, and come at last to be great clerks. And lift up 
your little white hands for me which prayeth for you to God : to 
whom be all honour and imperial majesty and glory. Amen." 

And there we must take leave of Dean Colet. " You would not 
hesitate," wrote Erasmus to a friend when he died, " to inscribe 
the name of this man in the roll of saints although uncanonised 
by the Pope." " For generations," wrote More, " we have not had 
amongst us any one man more learned or holy." 



LECTURE II. 



^tu^tnu^. 



" Erasmus was in truth, in his own age, the great Apostle of common-sense 
and of rational religion. He did not care for dogma ; and accordingly the 
dogmas of Rome, which had the consent of the Christian world, were in his 
eyes preferable to the dogmas of Protestantism, which destroyed the unity of the 
Church and threatened to open the way for every sort of extravagance. What 
he did care for was practical Christianity, and that he advocated with an 
earnestness and eloquence, and an unwearied devotion, which have perhaps 
never been surpassed. Peace, good-will, justice, righteousness, charity, — in 
pleading the cause of these virtues he knew neither fear nor favor. From the 
beginning to the end of his career he remained true to the great purpose of his 
life, which was to fight the battle of sound learning and plain cofnmon-sense- 
against the powers of ignorance and superstition, and amid all the convulsions 
of that period he never once lost his mental balance.'''' — R. B. Drummond. 

" He was brilliantly gifted. His industry never tired. His intellect was 
true to itself ; and no worldly motives ever tempted him into insincerity. He 
was even far braver than he professed to be. Had he been brotight to the trials 
he wotild have borne it better than many a man who boasted louder of his 
courage.^'' — J. A. Froude. 

" The one name in which the classical revival of Germany is summed up, 
is that of Erasmus. He is the typical northern scholar. No conte7}iporary 
Italian humanist had so great a reputation : he was recognized on both sides of 
the Alps as the literary chief of Europe.'''' — Hibbert Lectures for 1883. 

" A man with many faults, many weaknesses, with much vanity, with a want' 
of independence of character ; faults surely venial considering the circtimstances 
of his birth, his loneliness in the world, his want of natural friends, and even 
of country, and his physical infirmities: but a man who in the great period of 
dawning intellect, stood forth the foremost ; who in the scholar never forgot the 
Christian ; whose avowed object it was to associate the cultivation of letters with 
a simpler Christianity, a Christianity of life as of doctrine ; who in influence- 
at least was the g7'eatest of the ^Reformers before the Refor?iiationy — 
Dean Milman. 



LECTURE II. 



THE difficulty whicli liad to be met in speaking of the life of 
Dean Colet was the scantiness of the materials which have 
come down to us. The difficulty in the case of Erasmus is the 
extreme abundance of materials and the boundless number of 
interesting facts from which one has to select. I need hardly 
say that of these three Oxford Reformers, Erasmus, both in his 
own lifetime and since, has occupied by far the chief place in the 
world's estimation. His life has been written many times, though 
never perhaps in a manner worthy of the great scholar ; but no 
English writer has thought it worth while to give us a complete 
and adequate biography of Sir Thomas More. Colet and More, 
however, are mainly interesting to Englishmen. Erasmus belongs 
to Europe. He is a cosmopolitan, and no single country can 
claim exclusive possession of him. Holland gave him birth. 
France gave him education. England was generous to him when 
poor and unknown, and he loved her well, far better than his own 
country — "bread-and-butter land," as he scornfully termed it. 
Italy opened out to him the treasures of antiquity and enabled 
him to lead the Renaissance movement North of the Alps. 
Germany in the person of Charles V. courted him. Switzerland, 
when the Lutheran struggle grew hot and furious, affi^rded him a 
secure retreat during his later years. He wrote all his works in 
Latin, the common language of all educated Europeans in his 
time, and despised modern tongues, "uncouth, barbarous dialects,'* 
as they appeared to him. His position as chief amongst the 
aristocracy of scholars turned the eyes of the learned upon him. 
His own industry in letter-writing and his genial egotism combined 
to make his personality better known than that of any other man 



30 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

in Western Christendom. He was many-sided, and the interest 
of his life is ahnost inexhaustible. In an hour's space it will be 
hard to convey any adequate idea of his amazing activity as a 
thinker and man of letters, of his friendships and his quarrels, of 
his writing, of his unbounded influence over the educated men 
of his age. 

The youth of Erasmus is a tragic history which ought to incline 
us to a merciful judgment of his faults. The pitiful tale is no 
doubt familiar to most of you from the dramatic presentment of 
it in tolerably faithful details in Charles Reade's novel, 'The^ 
Cloister and the Hearth.' It is a terrible record of the suffering 
and the evil which the supplanting of God's laws of human affection 
by man's monastic theories too often caused during the Middle 
Ages. 

Erasmus was the base-born son of a youth whom persecution 
and diabolical fraud on the part of his relations forced into the 
monastic life which he abhorred. This youth, Gerard, was the 
ninth son of a respectable poor tradesman who lived at Tergou in 
Holland. Religious superstition induced his parents to believe 
that they owed one child to God, that is, to the monks. This,, 
added to the pressure of -a hard struggle for existence, made them 
resolve to consecrate Gerard, the wittiest and ablest of their sons,, 
to the service of the Church. Gerard, however, was utterly 
unwilling. The thought of a monastery was hateful to him, and 
morever he had given his heart to a young girl named Margaret, 
daughter of a physician at Sevenbergen. They were plighted, but 
never married. Gerard was pursued by his family with unrelenting 
persecution, and at last, in 1466, after Margaret had given birth 
at Rotterdam to the child who afterwards became famous under 
the name of Erasmus, he came to a final rupture with his parents 
and fled to Rome, where he gained success as a skillfiil copyist of 
manuscripts. His ability was great, and he seemed likely to rise 
from this occupation to scholarship and a career as a lawyer,, 
when a treacherous fraud on the part of his parents suddenly 
changed his whole life. They had never given up their intention 
that he should become a monk, and inasmuch as Gerard's love 
for Margaret stood in the way, they stooped to the basest artifice 



ERASMUS. 31 

and sent him word that she was dead. In his despair he entered 
a monastery and took the vows. Then soon afterwards returning 
to his own country, he found Margaret alive and well. His love 
for her had never wavered, but he was now a priest, sworn to a 
celibate hfe, and, with heroic conscientiousness, he surrendered 
his hopes of happiness and remained faithful to his priestly vows 
until the day of his death. The hapless monk and the ill-fated 
Margaret found now their one consolation in caring for the two 
children who had been born to them. Gerard sent his little 
Erasmus to the famous school of Deventer, and there Margaret, 
hearing that the town was stricken by the plague and hastening 
to save her son, caught the infection and died. Gerard, not yet 
forty years old, broken-hearted, soon followed her to the grave, 
and at thirteen Erasmus was left an orphan in the charge of 
cruel and unscrupulous guardians. 

The second chapter in his life is no less gloomy and tragic. The 
curse of enforced monasticism darkened his youth as it had his 
father's. Gerard had been entrapped into the priesthood by a 
cunning falsehood ; his son was inveigled into a monastery by 
treachery concealed under the guise of friendship. All in vain, 
his guardian, Peter Winckel, having embezzled his little property, 
endeavored, first by persuasion, then by threats and fears, to 
induce the lad to become a monk. Already at fifteen Erasmus 
longed for a scholar's life. " From the very first," says Mark 
Pattison, " the love of letters was the one ruling motive of his 
career." He might have resisted successfully the determination 
of his guardians to force him into a convent, but for the advice of 
a false friend, Cornelius Werden, who had himself joined a mon- 
astery at Stein, and who drew for him attractive pictures of the 
cultured leisure, the boundless opportunities for quiet study, the 
serene piety, which were to be found with the monks. His scruples 
were removed, and in the year 1486, at the age of nineteen, he 
entered upon his probation. For a while all went well. He was 
allowed to study as he chose, and monastic hfe was made easy for 
him. But long before the time arrived for taking the final step, 
disenchantment came. He found himself surrounded by idle, 
ignorant, and for the most part vicious men. The life of the 



32 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

monks, once pure and holy, had reached its worst degradation in 
the 15th century. " A monk's holy obedience," Erasmus wrote 
in latter years, " consists in — what ? In leading an honest, chaste, 
and sober life ? Not the least. In acquiring learning, in study, 
and industry ? Still less. A monk may be a glutton, a drunkard, 
an ignoraut, stupid, malignant; envious, bad man, but he has 
broken no vow, he is within his holy obedience. He has only to 
be the slave of a superior as bad as himself, and he is an excellent 
brother." Even had it been otherwise, had culture prevailed 
instead of intense ignorance and coarseness, had piety and good 
works existed instead of laziness and gluttony and drinking bouts 
intermingled with outward observances and fastings, Erasmus 
knew himself to be unfitted for the monastic career. His health 
was feeble, his constitution liable to terrible disease. Frequent 
fasting was an impossibility to him. Fish, the staple food of the 
monastery, he could not eat. His heart, as he once said, was 
CatholiCjbut his stomach was Protestant. Like most eager students 
he found sleep difficult, and once aroused he could not sleep again. 
As the day drew near when he must take the final step, his dis- 
like to the monastic existence became intensified. He appealed to 
his guardians. He threw himself upon the humanity of the monks. 
" Had they been," he wrote afterwards, " good. Christian, religious 
men, they would have known how unfit I was for their life. I was 
neither made for them nor they for me." The monks, however, 
would show him no mercy. They urged upon him that he had put his 
hand to the plow and must not turn back. It would be a sin 
before Heaven, and he would be infamous in the sight of all men, 
if he now withdrew. They reminded him of the stigma and the 
excommunication, social and religious, which awaited the apostate 
monk. His scruples, they assured him, were mere devices of 
Satan, which must be resisted and conquered. At last the poor 
lad, coaxed, threatened, denounced, deserted by his guardians, 
uncared for by his kinsmen, gave way and took the vows. Six 
years he spent in the monastery of Stein, not altogether unprofit- 
ably perhaps as regards his studies, for even there his indomitable 
love of learning enabled him to become one of the most brilUant 
Latin scholars of the time, but not without evil effects on his moral 



ERASMUS. ' 33 

character, which he himself acknowledged with remorse in latter 
life. At the end of six years, his deliverance came, and the most 
painful chapter in his history closed. The Bishop of Cambray, 
having hopes of being made a Cardinal at Rome, and needing a 
secretary who could write for him with elegant Latinity, chose 
Erasmus for the post ; but about the year 1492, having no further 
need of his services, he set him free and aided him in becoming a 
student at the University of Paris, then the chief centre of higher 
education on this side of the Alps, thronged by 10,000 students, 
mostly young, mostly poor. Paris, however, did little for Eras- 
mus. Scholastic studies chiefly prevailed, and the New Learning 
of Italy had few adherents. There was indeed a Professor of 
Greek, George Hermonymus of Sparta, but he was incompetent, 
and as Erasmus said, " could not have taught if he would, and 
would not if he could." Without Greek, however, Erasmus felt 
that he was nothing. He longed for Italy, but was too miserably 
poor to afibrd the journey. His poverty, indeed, exposed him at 
Paris to the greatest hardships. At the College of Montaigu, to 
which he belonged, the lodgings were filthy and pestilential, the 
food loathsome, the treatment barbarous and cruel. Erasmus 
declares that in this horrible place he had seen many students of 
high promise struck down by blindness, leprosy, and the plague. 
" I brought away from my College at Paris," he says of himself, 
" nothing but a broken constitution and plenty of vermin." 

No hardships, however, could daunt the young scholar's enthu- 
siasm for learning. Disappointed in his hope of Italy, he made 
his way to Oxford. Already he made his mark as a brilliant 
member of the Republic of Letters, and was beginning to gather 
round him a circle of faith:fiil and attached friends. Amongst 
these was his pupil, the rich English nobleman. Lord Mountjoy, 
by whose generosity he was enabled to come to Oxford, and who 
is entitled to the largest share of credit in aiding Erasmus to 
become the greatest scholar of his time. 

England received him with open arms, and at Oxford he soon 
became the intimate friend of John Colet, Grocyn and Linacre, 
the opponents of the old scholastic theology, the first founders of 
the reformed learning in England. Here at last he received from 

3 



34 



THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 



William Grocyn that knowledge of the Greek language which he 
had so long desired in vain, giving to the historian, Edmund 
Gibbon, thereby the opportunity of uttering that malicious half- 
truth of his, that " Erasmus learnt Greek at Oxford and taught 
it at Cambridge." Without falling a victim to a puerile patriot- 
ism for one's own university, it may be permitted, perhaps, to 
Oxford men to be proud that it was hither in the year 1498 that 
Erasmus bent his steps to procure that new learning by whose 
aid he afterwards so powerfully influenced the thought of 
Europe. 

Oxford gave him something more than mere knowledge of 
Greek. His friendship with Colet was of immense advantage to 
Erasmus in determining the aims of his life, and in moderating 
the Bohemian tendencies of the mtty Paris student's nature. 
Intellectually, when he arrived in Oxford, he was still in bondage 
to the Schoolmen. It was Colet who set him free and taught him 
that simpler, more reasonable Christianity which it was the work 
of his hfe to expound to the world. 

This first visit to England brought him into contact with his 
future life-long friend, Thomas More, the brilliant student whom 
John Colet proclaimed to be the one sohtary genius whom England 
at this time possessed. How or when they first became acquainted 
we do not know ; but everybody, I suppose, has heard the famous 
story related by one of More's biographers, that these two scholars, 
whose fame was already known to each other, met accidentally at 
the Lord Mayor's table in London. Soon the strangers were 
involved in a furious argument, Erasmus, after his custom, abusing 
the monks and clergy. More with great skill and ready wit 
defending them. Erasmus had the worst of it, and at last it 
dawned upon him that this quick-witted antagonist must be the 
young genius whose praises John Colet had sung to him. " Aut 
tu es Morus aut nuUus," he suddenly exclaimed, and was met by 
More's ready retort, " Aut tu es Erasmus aut diabolus." 

The story may be apocryphal, though Mr. Seebohm, in his 
excellent book on the Oxford Reformers, seems to countenance it. 
What is certain is that from the year 1498 onward, Colet, 
Erasmus, and More are bound together not only by a close 



ERASMUS. 35 

personal friendship, but also by community of aims and almost 
identical views on the great problems of their time. 

Naturally enough, with such friends, Erasmus grew attached to 
England. " I am not a native of Britain," he once wrote to King 
Henry VIII., " and yet when I consider how many years I have 
lived in that country, how many patrons, how many excellent and 
sincere friends I owe to it, I have as hearty a love and esteem for 
it as if I had drawn my first breath in it." There was nothing in 
England he disliked, except the beer ! He was surprised, but not 
displeased, by the custom of the English ladies of according a 
hearty salute of the lips to all stranger-guests when welcoming them 
or bidding farewell. A native of Holland, he found our climate 
endurable. It was as delightful as it was healthy, he reported to 
his friends. As for the English folk, they were delightful too, only 
he adds by way of warning, " You must always behave modestly, 
and not be too free in expressing your dislike of anything which 
you may see in this country. For the English people are, not 
without reason, lovers of their native land." England, moreover, 
in his views was by no means the barbarian and uncultured clime 
its enemies depicted. " I have found here," he says, " so much 
polish and learning — not showy, shallow learning, but profound 
and exact, both in Latin and Greek — that now I hardly care much 
about going to Italy at all, except for the sake of having been 
there. When I listen to my friend Colet, it seems to me like 
listening to Plato himself. In Grocyn, who does not admire the 
wide range of his knowledge ? What could be more searching, 
deep and refined than the judgment of Linacre? Whenever did 
nature mould a character more gentle, endearing and happy than 
Thomas More's ? " 

If John Colet could have had his way, Erasmus would never 
have left England. He saw in him a splendid intellect, and the 
fittest instrument for carrying on the work which he had begun. 
He entreated him to remain at Oxford, to aid in getting rid of the 
Scholastic theology which had obscured the Christian Gospel, to 
do for the Old Testament what he himself was endeavouring to 
do for St. Paul's Epistles. Erasmus refused. He was thirty-three 
years old, and had been a student all his life, but he counted 



36 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

Mmself a mere tyro in sdiolarship and longed for the opportunities 
whicli, after all, only Italy could give. Some day, he told Colet, 
"when he had matured his powers, he would help him in his great 
work. In January, 1500, the restless scholar, panting for new 
knowledge, left England for Italy. 

Henceforth for fifteen years his history is a record of wander- 
ings from University to University, of hard struggles caused by 
insufficient means, of gradual conquest of the whole realm of 
knowledge as it then existed, of daily increasing reputation, of 
amazing literary activity, of final triumph as the leading man of 
letters in Europe, courted by Popes and Emperors and Kings. It 
is almost bewildering to follow him in his wanderings from 
England to France, from France to Holland, from Holland to 
Italy, from Italy back to England. In 1500, after leaving Oxford^ 
he had intended to make his way beyond the Alps, but the English 
custom-house officials robbed him of his money, and he was 
obHged to betake himself to Paris and earn a few pounds by 
the pubhcation of his first important book, his 'Adagia,' or 
collection of classical proverbs. Poor, and often in ill health, 
his enthusiasm for learning never abated, and it is difficult not to 
feel intense admiration for his heroic struggle against disease and 
poverty and gloom. " As soon as I get money," he writes at this 
time, "I shall buy Greek books, and then I shall buy some clothes." 
Not till 1505 did he reahze the dream of his life and visit Italy, 
and even then he met with disappointment. The golden age of the 
Renaissance was over. Instead of a peaceful land of culture and 
civilization, he found Italy distracted by war. The reigning Pope 
was Julius II.jMichael Angelo's Julius,who was never happy except 
at the head of an army, and who was ready to deluge Italy with 
blood if he might thereby enlarge the temporal dominion of 
the Papacy. Erasmus, the consistent, determined, unflinching 
denouncer of war, was brought face to face in the streets of 
Bologna with a Vicar of Christ, arrayed in jackboots and mihtary 
attire, triumphing at the head of a mercenary army of scoundrels 
and banditti over conquered foes. What Leo X. and Rome did 
for Luther, Julius II. and Bologna did for Erasmus. He remained 
all his life faithful to the idea of Papal Supremacy, but he did not 



ERASMUS. 37 

hesitate to denounce in the plainest language such popes as 
Alexander VI., Julius II., and Leo X. While Julius was still 
alive he dared to use, in a satire which was read all over Europe, 
such words as these. " Though war is so cruel," he wrote, " that it 
becomes wild beasts rather than men, so pestilential that it brings 
in its train a universal dissolution of manners, so impious that it 
has no connection with Christ, so unjust that it is usually carried 
on best by the worst robbers ; yet, neglecting everything else, the 
supreme Pontiffs make this the only business of their life. Here 
you may see even decrepit old men shewing all the vigour of 
youth, incurring any expense, deterred by nothing, if only they 
can overturn law, religion, peace, and throw all the world into 
confusion." Thirty years later such words would have cost 
Erasmus dear. For the present the Papacy, secure in its 
unchallenged power, confident in its strength, bore with easy 
tolerance the shafts of ridicule which the wandering scholar 
aimed at it. 

His visit to Italy, notwithstanding, was of great importance to 
Erasmus. It was, as it were, the completion of his twenty years of 
preparatory study. He was now recognized by the scholars of 
Italy as their equal and peer. He returned to England in the 
year 1509, master of all the learning Bologna and Florence and 
Venice could give him, the intimate friend of the most famous 
scholars of Italy, strengthened for his future struggle with the 
monks by influence with the most powerful Cardinals at Rome. 
As he crossed the Alps on his journey to England, he can scarcely 
have been ignorant that he, the base-born son of the monk 
Gerard, himself an apostate monk — for he had lately obtained 
leave of the Pope to renounce the cowl of his order, was now by 
universal consent the chief of Transalpine scholars, the supreme 
Pontiff of the aristocracy of letters. His fame had now spread to 
every land. Europe was ready to listen with respect to his 
slightest word. 

He was not long in delivering his message, in shewing the 
direction which the Teutonic Renaissance under his leadership 
was Kkely to take. Traveling through Italy and France on his 
mule, Erasmus had occupied himself with reflections upon what 



38 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

lie had seen in Italy and the state of Christendom, which resulted 
in the production at Sir Thomas More's house of his famous book 
' The Praise of Folly.' Ostensibly it is a mere squib, a merry 
piece of fim, composed by the great scholar to while away days 
of great suffering by which he was at this time unfitted for serious 
labor. In reahty the ' Praise of Folly ' is one of the most power- 
ful satires of a century which produced the ' Epistles of Obscure 
Men ' and More's ' Utopia.' It is a serious indictment of the 
abuses of the time. Its exposure of the monks and the cor- 
ruption of the Church did much to prepare the way for the 
Reformation. 

We in this day can scarcely grasp the opportunities possessed 
by a man of letters who wrote in the common language of the 
educated of all countries. The ' Encomium Morise ' ran through 
seven editions, twenty thousand copies, in a few months. Holbein 
illustrated it. For years it was constantly being translated or 
re-edited. A hundred and twenty years later, John Milton found 
it in everybody's hands at Cambridge. Unlike many of the more 
scholarly of the works of Erasmus and his contemporaries, which 
repose decently in undisturbed rest on the shelves of our public 
libraries, the ' Praise of Folly ' still lives, made readable by its 
blended sense and humour. 

The idea of the little book is this. The goddess FoUy ascends 
a rostrum, arrayed in cap and bells, and pronounces upon herself 
that eulogy which an ungrateful world has forgotten to accord to 
her. She claims to be the chief of aU goddesses, man's best 
benefactress, the cause of all his happiness, the giver of all his 
pleasures. " Who knows not," she argues, " that man's childhood 
is by far the most delightful period of his existence ? And why ? 
Because he is then most a fool. And next to that his youth, in 
which folly still prevails ; while in proportion as he retires from 
her dominion and becomes possessed, through discipline and 
experience, of mature wisdom, his beauty loses its bloom, his 
strength declines, his wit becomes less pungent. At last weary 
old age succeeds, with a weariness which would be absolutely 
unbearable, did not Folly, in pity of such grievous miseries, give 
relief by bringing on a second childhood." It is true, she admits, 



ERASMUS. 39 

that Reason also has a share in influencing the life of men, but 
then how small a share ! Jupiter intended them to be merry, and 
took care that reason should exist in due subordination. More- 
over, as an antidote to the dangerous effects of wisdom, Folly 
herself, had advised the creation of woman — "a foolish, silly 
creature, no doubt," she says, " but amusing and agreeable, who 
owes to me alone those endowments in which she excels and 
surpasses man." Next, we are to mark how dependent we are 
upon Folly for the joys of life. She it is who, makes friendship 
possible by hiding each other's faults. Cupid, too, is a blind little 
fool. Woe to society were it otherwise ! Self-esteem is only 
another form of foolishness, but without it the world could scarce 
go on. " Take away this one property of a fool," she argues 
wittily, " and the orator shall become as dumb and silent as the 
pulpit he stands in ; the musician shall hang up his untouched 
instrument on the wall ; the completest actors shall be hissed off 
the stage; the painter shall himself vanish into an imaginary 
landscape." On the other hand, what happiness does self-esteem 
bring, which so flushes men with a good conceit of their own that 
no one repents of his shape, his wit, of his education, or of his 
country! so that the dirty half-drowned Hollander would not 
remove into the pleasant plains of Italy, nor the brutish Scythian 
quit his thorny deserts to become an inhabitant of the Fortunate 
Island. 

It is a mistake. Folly continues, to pay so much regard to wise 
men. Geniuses manage their domestic concerns very badly. 
Grave scholars are like death's-heads at a feast, like camels at a 
dance, dull and useless in common life. They are no good either 
for war or politics. In battle your Demosthenes runs away. The 
best soldiers are courageous louts and shallow-brained plow- 
boys. As for government and Plato's philosopher-kings, bookish 
and learned governors are the worst in the world. A pretty 
business the Catos and Gracchi and Brutuses made of it ! Even 
Antoninus did not (lo his people so much good by his msdom as 
he did harm by leaving a Commodus to succeed him. Nature, 
luckily, takes care that this curse of wisdom shall not become 
hereditary. The children of Socrates were dull, insipid soul?, or as 



40 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

some one ingeniously expresses it — " they had more of the mother 
than the father." 

Worst of all, wise men are wretched. It is the fools who are 
happy. Wisdom opens our eyes to the miserable spectacle of 
the countless ills flesh is heir to: infirmity, disease and death; 
besides all that man inflicts upon his fellow — a prospect that 
has to many sages made suicide sweet and welcome. Were 
wisdom less rare, all would act thus and the race would become 
extinct. The truly happy are the votaries of Folly, on whom 
shame, disgrace, abuse, fall pointless. Her blessed illusions are 
what bind men to life and give them joy. 

After more of this admirable fooling, the goddess suddenly 
forgets herself and becomes serious. She can joke no longer 
when she has to speak of schoolmen and theologians, kings 
and popes and monks, as they were at the end of the fifteenth 
century. It is John Colet who speaks now. Erasmus has at 
least redeemed his promise to aid him in his crusade both against 
an obsolete theology and a corrupt and degraded church. Folly 
claims the scholastic divines as her peculiar disciples. " It is by 
one of my properties, self-love," she says, " that they fancy them- 
selves caught up to the third Heaven, from whence they look down 
with contempt upon the whole human race as if they were cattle 
creeping on the ground." She lashes the commentators, who 
make darker what was dark before ; the theologians, who explain 
exactly how the worlds were created and the foundations of the 
earth were laid — " at whose conjectures," she observes drily, 
" Nature is mightily amused ;" the divines, " who minutely 
describe everything in the infernal regions as if they had passed 
many years in that kingdom ; and concludes her attack upon the 
schoolmen by a modest proposal to send the whole tribe of confident 
controversialists to do battle against the Turks. Nothing, she is 
sure, could stand against their invincible prowess. 

The monks fare even worse than the theologians, and Erasmus 
the Catholic rages against them far more bitterly than any 
Protestant Foxe or Tyndale. " These very delightful men," he 
writes, " who are remarkable for their dirt, their ignorance, their 
clownish manners, who bellow for bread in front of our doors. 



ERASMUS. 41 

who bray out in churcli the psalms which they count indeed but 
cannot understand, they pretend forsooth that they are the 
genuine successors of the Apostles ! Their religion consists in 
having their dress of the prescribed shape, material, pieces, their 
girdle in so many knots, their sleep in so many divisions. They 
strive not so much to be like Christ as to be unlike one another. 
If they only knew what will befall them on the last day, when the 
Judge shall demand to see their works of charity ! What will 
they have to shew ? Bushels of psalms sung, tons of fish eaten ; 
one will bring his single hood never changed, another the gloves 
without which for sixty years he never handled money, others will 
point to numbness or paralysis brought on by the confinement of 
the cell. But the Judge will interrupt them. ' Whence comes 
this new race of Jews ! My mansions are promised to deeds of 
faith and charity. I will have righteousness and not traditions.' " 
We might have expected that Erasmus, a Catholic priest, but 
lately at Rome, in favor at the Papal Court, would have spared 
Popes* and Cardinals. But he does not. He has seen evil and 
will denounce it, poor scholar though he is, dependent for his 
very bread upon the donations of his friends. " Now as to the 
Popes of Rome," he represents his mouth-piece Folly as saying — 
" who pretend themselves Christ's vicars, if they would but imitate 
His exemplary life in the being attended with poverty, nakedness, 
hunger, and a contempt of the world, what order of men would 
be in a worse condition ? How much of their pleasure would be 
abated if they were but endowed with one dram of wisdom? All 
their riches, all their honour, their Peter's patrimony, their offices, 
their indulgences — in a word, all their perquisites would be 
forfeited and lost ; and in their room would succeed watchings, 
fastings, tears, prayers, hard studies, repenting sighs, and a 
thousand such-like severe penalties. The very head of the 
Church, the spiritual Prince, would then be brought from all his 
splendor to the poor equipage of a scrip and staflT. But all this 
is upon the supposition only," he concludes with bitter sarcasm, 
" that they understood what circumstances they are placed in ; 
whereas now by a wholesome neglect of thinking, they live as well 
as heart can wish : whatever of toil and drudgery belongs to their 



42 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

office, that they assign over to S. Peter or S. Paul, who have time 
enough to mind it." 

This, then, was the first fruit of the Kenaissance working upon 
the Teutonic mind — simply a moral revolt against the corrupt 
Christianity of the time. The Humanists of Italy had ceased to 
believe in the Gospel. The scholars of Germany and England 
merely appealed from the false Christianity to the true ; and it 
was this moral repulsion from the base and wicked lives of Popes 
and clergy which made possible the success of Luther. It remains 
a mystery how they could aUow Erasmus to proclaim their shame 
to the world. Cardinals and worldly Bishops read the ' Praise 
of FoUy ' without a protest, with amused indifference, with 
admiration for this entertaining fellow Erasmus. They did not 
dream that its destructive criticism might aid in rending the 
Church asunder. They forgot that all men's consciences were not 
dead like their own. They forgot that the great heart of the 
world is just. Pope Leo X. read the book, and merely remarked 
that Erasmus, too, had his corner in the region of Folly. •It was 
the same Pope, you may remember, who said when he was 
shewn Martin Luther's ninety-five propositions, "A drunken 
German wrote them ; when he has slept off his wine, he will be 
of another mind." 

Successful as it was and universally read, the ' Praise of Folly ' 
did nothing towards helping Erasmus to live. He never seems 
to have expected an income from the sale of his books. He 
wrote because he could not help it, not in order to earn money. 
And if you ask how he hved, I am afraid one must answer, by 
constant, pertinacious, shameless begging. Erasmus was the 
sturdy mendicant of Hterature, and his letters of this period consist 
largely of humiliating appeals to his friends for money. He was 
no longer exactly a poor man. Lord Mountjoy had given him a 
pension for fife of a hundred crowns, Archbishop Warham another 
of like amount, and every year he received some hundreds of nobles 
in presents from various patrons scattered all over Europe. He 
possessed two horses, he himself tells us, " better fed than their 
owner, and a couple of grooms better clothed than their master." 
His friends, Colet and Linacre, from time to time seem to have 



ERASMUS, 43 

gi\en him the hint to live more economically, and in modern 
times, harsh critics of his career, like Mr. Fronde, have accused 
him of being a lover of pleasure, " a clever, healthy, epicurean man 
of the world." Nothing could be more scandalously unjust. Eras- 
mus was really a devoted, hard-working scholar, whose profession 
necessitated constant journeys to consult books and manuscripts, 
whose frail health and diseased body made poverty doubly hard. 
It is pitiable, no doubt, to read the letters in which he begs for 
money, presses Colet for a few crowns, and blames Linacre for his 
stinginess, but the shame of it does not belong entirely to Erasmus. 
Here was a man, doing work for Europe that no other scholar in 
the world could do, living centuries before the time when an author 
could expect from an impersonal public an honourable reward, in 
an epoch which saw a Wolsey rise from obscurity to boundless 
wealth, at a time when abject flattery and ignoble services could 
earn bishoprics and cardinals' hats : bravely refusing to cringe and 
flatter, denouncing, as courageous men of letters have done in 
every age, the crimes of the great and powerful, compelled to sue 
to friends for a modest sustenance. I say the shame is not his. 
We do not love Dean Colet when he writes to Erasmus, " If you 
beg humbly I have something for you ; but if you ask immodestly, 
poverty must help poverty, to say the least, very poorly. You will 
do well in my opinion to imitate Diogenes." We admire, rather, 
the ever generous and sympathetic Archbishop Warham. " I send 
you thirty angels," he writes. " I wish there were ten legions of 
them. Use them for the recovery of your health, and I only wish 
I could purchase health for you for a much larger sum. Take 
good care of yourself, and do not defraud me by your illness of 
the brilhant hopes I have entertained of you, and of the fruit of 
your learning." 

Erasmus had returned to England in the hope of obtaining that 
independence which he felt was not to be had under Papal 
patronage at Rome; and in 1511, this hope seemed about to be 
realized, when, by the influence of Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, one 
of the best friends of the New Learning, he was appointed Lady 
Margaret Professor of Divinity and in some sort reader in Greek 
at Cambridge. Cambridge, however, was not kind to Erasmus. 



44 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

His enemies, tlie scholastic divines, still flourislied there, and the 
University was a little behind the times, being scarcely as far 
advanced as Oxford was when Erasmus first visited it fourteen years 
before. His lectures on the Greek language were badly attended, 
and at the end of two years, having almost completed the great 
work of his life — his edition and translation of the New Testa- 
ment, he was thoroughly discontented, and ready to set out on his 
travels again. " I have been living for some months," he writes 
in 1513 to his friend Ammonius, " the life of a snail, shut up at 
home and buried in my books. Cambridge is a complete desert ; 
most of the men are away for fear of the plague, though when they 
are all here, even then it is a desert. The expense is intolerable, 
and there is not a farthing to get. I am determined now to leave 
no stone unturned, and, as they say, to cast my sheet anchor. If 
I succeed, I shall make my nest. If not, I shaU flit." 

There is one episode of his stay at Cambridge which I ought to 
notice before I pass on, because it illustrates exactly the attitude 
of the Oxford Reformers to the ecclesiastical questions of the time, 
and the direction which they thought reform should take. In one 
of his best-known books, his 'Colloquies,' Erasmus has given us 
an account of a pilgrimage which about this time John Colet and 
himself made to the famous shrine of Thomas a Becket at Canter- 
bury. They were shewn the dagger of the saint, his skull cased 
in silver, and a perfect mine of bones; all of which they were 
expected to kiss, much to Colet's disgust. He seems to have 
behaved indeed as badly as any Protestant could have done. 
When the shrine of S. Thomas was displayed, blazing in gold 
and jewels, he enquired from the guide whether S. Thomas 
when he was alive was not very kind to the poor. The verger 
assented. " Then," said Colet, " he would probably prefer that these 
vast riches should go to lighten the burden of poor men's poverty 
rather than that they should be hoarded here, useless to any one.' ' 
This, however, was not the worst. By and bye, the prior of 
Canterbury, knowing Colet's distinguished position, opened a 
chest, and taking out several dilapidated rags which S. Thomas 
was reputed to have used to wipe his brow, offered one of 
them to Colet as a present of untold value. ''Again," says 



ERASMUS. 45 

Erasmus, "my friend was very rude. He touched the rag 
with the tips of his fingers, with a look of great disgust, and 
contemptuously put it down, making at the same time a sort of 
whistle, as was his way when displeased. I was ashamed of 
him, but the Prior wisely took no notice of his rudeness, and 
shortly took his leave. On our departure from Canterbury we 
passed through a lane where a mendicant monk sprinkled us 
with holy water and invited Colet to kiss a shoe, which he 
said was a relic of S. Thomas. " What ! " Colet said to me 
passionately, " do these idiots expect us to kiss the shoe of 
every good man ? " So ended this curious pilgrimage of these 
precursors of the Eeformation. "In that meeting," says Dean 
Stanley, " of the old monk with the two strangers in the Canter- 
bury lane, how completely do we read, in miniature, the whole 
history of the coming revolution in Europe." 

The year 1514 found Erasmus at Basle, which henceforth 
though he continued his restless wanderings, became his head- 
quarters and his real home. Here he formed a close friend, 
ship with the great printer Froben, one of those scholarly men 
without whose enthusiastic help the Revival of Learning must 
have been long delayed, from whose press at this time new 
editions of Greek and Roman classics, of the writings of the 
Fathers, of the New Testament itself, began to issue every, 
year. 

We may regard the period which we have now reached, that 
which elapses between the year 1514 and the outbreak of the 
Reformation struggle, as the happiest and most prosperous, the 
most useful and fertile in great works, of the whole life of Erasmus. 
He was now beyond the reach of poverty. Offei-s of promotion 
and honourable posts reached him from every court in Europe : 
from the Emperor Charles V., from the King of France, from 
Pope Adrian VI. Amongst men of letters north of the Alps 
he was without a rival. His works were universally read ; he 
had carried the educated world with him ; his enemies were 
discredited; scholasticism was dying; the New Learning was 
everywhere triumphing. "Had Erasmus departed from the 
world at this time," says Dean Milman, "it might have been 



46 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

happier perhaps for himself — happier, no doubt, for his fame. 
His character, in spite of infirmities, would have been well-nigh 
blameless. Though not himself, strictly speaking, to have been 
enrolled in the noble and martyr band of the assertors of religious 
fireedom, he would have been honoured as the most illustrious of 
their precursors and prophets, as having done more than any one 
to break the bonds of scholasticism, superstition, ignorance, and 
sacerdotal tyranny." 

Of the books of this period, many in number, most of them 
memorable, there are two only which I have time to notice. The 
first of these is the ' Novum Instrumentum,' as Erasmus called it, 
his edition of the Greek text of the New Testament, accompanied 
by a fresh Latin translation of his own. It is a work which every 
one ought to know something about. "It contributed more," 
says Mr. Mark Pattison, " to the liberation of the human mind 
from the thraldom ofthe mediaeval clergy than all the uproar and 
rage of Luther's many pamphlets." What then exactly, was it, we 
may ask, that Erasmus efiected ? The answer must be, that through 
his agency the world was placed in possession of printed copies of 
the New Testament, not in a Latin translation, but in the original 
Greek. For centuries the Church had used no other version but 
the Vulgate, the Latin translation due mainly to S. Jerome, which 
alone was quoted by divines, and every word of which was regarded 
by them as supernaturally inspired. It required the utmost daring 
in the beginning of the sixteenth century even to hint that the 
Vulgate was not always accurate. It seems incredible, but men 
had largely forgotten that S. Paul and S. John did not write in 
Latin, and the outcry was great when Erasmus printed the original 
Greek text. He was correcting the Holy Ghost, the theologians 
said. " It cannut be," wrote one, " that the unanimous universal 
Church now for so many centuries has been mistaken, which has 
always used the Vulgate version. Many wiU doubt if they learn 
that even one jot or tittle in the Holy Scriptures is false ; and then 
will come to pass what Augustine described to Jerome, *If any 
error should be admitted to have crept into the Holy Scriptures, 
what authority would be left to them ? ' " Erasmus, however, was 
not deterred, and held on his way undismayed. He was confident 



ERASMUS. ■ 47 

of the truth of Christianity, and was the strongest opponent of the 
sceptical scholars of Italy ; but he would not blind his eyes to 
manifest facts. He was as fervent a believer in the Bible as 
Martin Luther himself, and in his preface to his New Testament 
there is a noble passage which William Tyndale might have 
written. " I altogether and utterly dissent," he says, " from those 
who are unwilling that the Holy Scriptures, translated into the 
vulgar tongue, should be read by private persons, as though the 
teachings of Christ were so abstruse as to be intelligible only to a 
few theologians, or as though the safety of Scripture rested on 
man's ignorance of it. It may be well to conceal the mysteries of 
kings ; but Christ willed that His mysteries should be published as 
widely as possible. I wish that even the weakest woman should 
read the Gospel — should read the Epistles of St. Paul. I long 
that the husbandman should sing portions of them to himself as 
he follows the plough, that the weaver should hum them to the 
tune of his shuttle, that the traveler should beguile with their 
stories the tedium of his journey." — Notwithstanding, he wiU not 
consent to stultify his reason, and in the best sense of the word he 
was a rationalist critic of the Bible. He fearlessly cast out from 
his edition spurious texts like that of the 'three Heavenly Wit- 
nesses ' which remained in our English Bibles until the other day. 
Following his great master, S. Jerome, he denied verbal inspira- 
tion, and pointed out that when S. Mark wrote Abiathar, he made 
a mistake for Ahimelech, and that often when the Apostles quote 
from the Old Testament they do not give the exact words of the 
original. He had doubts as to whether S. John wrote the Apo- 
calypse, and felt convinced that the Epistle to the Hebrews was 
not written by S. Paul. He blundered often enough, it is true, as 
was inevitable to a pioneer in a new path, but in a very real and 
true sense he is entitled to be called the father of modern Biblical 
criticism. 

It was not, however, views of this kind which gave the greatest 
offence to the monks and theologians. It was bad enough that a 
man should presume to correct the sacred Vulgate, and to remind 
divines that they were ignorant of the language in which the 
original documents of Christianity were written, but in his notes 



48 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

and annotations to his New Testament, Erasmus assailed tlie pop- 
ular religion of his day in the most uncompromising manner, and 
struck at every abuse of the Church as boldly as WycHffe or 
Luther. He attacked auricular confession, fasts and feasts, relics 
and pilgrimages, even the celibacy of the clergy. He denied that 
the words, " Upon this rock I will build my church," applied 
exclusively to the Pope. He refers contemptuously to the " mira- 
culous oil exhibited in the churches, the fragments of the Cross in 
such quantities that if they could be brought together it would take 
a merchant vessel to hold them all." In his note on S. Paul's 
statement that he preached the Gospel without charge, he says, 
" That was a boast truly worthy of an Apostle, but one which na 
one in our days is ambitious of making. Nothing is to be had 
now without money. You cannot even get buried free of cost." 

Six years later he continued and developed these teachings in 
the most famous of all his works, the * Colloquies,' which was 
published in 1522. It is a collection of dialogues and satires, free 
and outspoken as ever — in spite of the fact that Luther had been 
condemned by the Pope and the Reformation struggle had begun 
— against the corruptions of Christianity. No book of his is more 
characteristic of Erasmus than this ; in its humour, its common 
sense, its detestation of falsehood and tyranny, its fervent appeals 
on behalf of high and noble living. His tolerance is shown when 
he declines to consign to damnation the good men of antiquity, 
and wishes that more Christians could die like Socrates. He 
comes very closely to the modern spirit when he asks : May not 
matrimony be as pure as celibacy ? Can we not trust that the 
God of love will be as open to our prayers as any of His saints ? 
What undutiful duteousness it is to go on pilgrimage to Jerusa- 
lem and leave a wife and little children imcared-for at home ? Is 
it not absurd to see the treasures of saints who, when on earth, 
gave all to the poor ? Is not baptism a sufficient renunciation of 
the world, without taking monastic vows as well ? How many^ 
like the Pharisees, stop at ceremonies and never aim at charity? 
Do the begging friars remember the words, " It is more blessed to 
give than to receive," or the ascetics that the Son of Man came 
eating and drinking ? 



ERASMUS. ' 49* 

Once more, we have to ask in vain : How did Erasmus escape 
being punished as a heretic ? It was not until 1526 that the 
University of Paris condemned the ' Colloquies' as a work in 
which the author, " like a heathen, ridicules, satirizes, and sneers 
at the Christian religion and its holy ceremonies and observances.'^ 
It was not until after his death that the Inquisition placed the 
book upon the Index, and forbade any loyal Catholic to read it. 

We come now to the most important and difficult problem in 
the life of Erasmus, his attitude toward Luther and the Refor- 
mation. How is it, we hear it continually asked, that this man 
who hated monkery, ridiculed relics and pilgrimages and prayers 
to the saints, disbelieved in confession and celibacy, venerated the 
Scripture, and declined to allow complete autocracy to the Papacy, 
who longed to cleanse the Church of its corruptions and restore 
Christianity to its primitive purity — how is it that he, like Sir 
Thomas More, his fellow-disciple, is found at last in hostility to 
Luther, on the side of Romanism and the Pope ? 

The popular theory seems to be that Erasmus would have sided 
with Luther if he had not been a coward, too fond of his ease and 
his reputation to battle for a cause which he knew in his heart to 
be just : that he, in fact, sacrificed his convictions to his interests, 
and sold himself to the devil. " He knew Luther to be right," 
says Froude, in his brilliant and most misleading essay on the 
subject. " Luther had but said what Erasmus all his life had been 
convinced of, and Luther looked to see him come forward and 
take his place at his side. Had Erasmus done so, the course of 
events would have been far happier and better. But there would 
have been some danger — danger to the leaders, if certainty of 
triumph to the cause — and Erasmus had no gift of martyrdom." 

No gift of martyrdom ! It is true. Erasmus, it may be freely 
admitted, had not the moral heroism of Luther. It is difficult to- 
imagine him confronting an assembly of eager enemies thirsting 
for his death, and boldly throwing down his gage of battle :: 
" Here stand I. I will not retract. God help me. Amen." No 
doubt the chief fault of Erasmus was timidity, the timidity of 
a toil-worn scholar, growing old, longing for peace, made weak 
by fifty years' struggle against the most painful and distracting^ 



so THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

malady known to man. " Not every one lias strength for martyr, 
dom," lie himself wrote, with noble humility : " If I were put in 
S. Peter's place, I fear I should imitate S. Peter." 

The truth, however, seems to be this. Erasmus has, been 
traduced by both Catholics and Protestants. His influence 
was the most important and weighty in all Europe, and both 
parties strove hard to win him for their own. But he belonged 
to neither of them. He occupied a middle position, too much a 
Reformer for monks and Papal theologians, too little a revolu- 
tionist for Luther and his followers. He was the Lord Falkland 
of the Reformation, and, like Lord Falkland, he has been accused 
of cowardice and inconsistency, irresolution and treason to the 
right, when his real crime was that he was too clear-sighted to 
become a narrow partisan, too honest to shut his eyes to the 
grievous faults on both sides. A^U honour to martyrs : to Luther 
with his single-hearted devotedness to what he believed to be the 
truth, to Sir Thomas More with his noble sacrifice of his life in a 
cause he believed to be sacred ! But whose heart does not go out 
in sympathy to this maligned scholar, who had spent his existence 
in brave batthng against corruption and wickedness, now made the 
mark for violent abuse and coarse invective, condemned by all later 
generations as a coward and a time-server because he was too con- 
scientious to join heartily with Pope and Cardinals against Luther, 
too far-sighted to welcome with delight the prospect of a divided 
Christendom and centuries of horrible civil war waged in the name 
of religion, which he saw Luther's violent policy would make 
inevitable ? It is idle to complain that he did not take his stand 
by Luther's side, that he was not ready to die in defence of Luther's 
doctrines. He had no belief in them. Mr. Froude is positively 
mistaken when he declares that Erasmus knew Luther to be in 
the right. The two men agreed only in denouncing the abuses of 
Catholicism, the worship of relics, the corruption of the monastic 
orders, the worldly and evil lives of Bishops and Cardinals, and so 
forth ; otherwise they were as far asunder as the poles. For Luther's 
dogma of justification by faith, rightly or wrongly, Erasmus 
had the greatest abhorrence. He hated theological metaphysics, 
and his common sense revolted against Luther's strenuous assertion 



ERASMUS. 51 

of the non-freedom of the human will, which lay at the root of all 
his teaching. Erasmus treated it as an absurd paradox. Luther 
says of it, " This matter is to me serious, necessary, and eternal, 
more momentous than life itself, and to be asserted, even should 
it plunge the world into conflict, or bring it to chaos." He did 
not shrink from the most extreme inferences that could be drawn 
from his favourite doctrine, and when Erasmus inquired what men 
would take trouble to amend their Hves if they had satisfied them- 
selves that all their actions were pre-determined and necessary, he 
boldly replied ; " No one will amend his life ; the elect will have 
theirs amended for them; the non-elect must perish in their 
misery." That fatal sentence of his is almost sufficient justifi- 
cation of the position of Erasmus, from which he never swerved : 
" Do the will of Christ, and leave dark mysteries alone." 

It is difficult again to see why he should be blamed for not 
following the example of Luther in rebelling against the Papacy 
and dividing the Christian Church. Luther, at the beginning of 
his reforming career, believed in the Papacy as much as he did. 
He did not turn against the Pope until the Pope turned against 
him, and we have his own word for it that if Leo X. had given 
way on two points — the granting of the cup to the laity and 
marriage to the clergy — there would have been no schism. The 
difierence between the two men lay here. Both aimed at reforms 
in the Cathohc Church. Erasmus believed that they cOuld be 
brought about gradually, peacefully, by the spread of education, 
without destroying the unity of the Church and plunging Europe 
into centuries of fatricidal war. Luther, on the contrary, was a 
violent revolutionist, prepared to break mth the past, ready to 
sacrifice unity and brotherhood for what he beUeved to be the 
victory of truth. I do not contend that Luther was wrong and 
Erasmus right. Certainly, we have paid a heavy price for the free- 
dom which the Reformation gave ; but it may have been inevitable. 
It may well have been that the Church was too corrupt to be 
cleansed by the moderate and peaceful methods of the Oxford 
Reformers. The dream of Erasmus of a broad, comprehensive, 
tolerant Catholic Church, whose enforced dogmas should be few, 
whose theology should be simple, whose prelates should be 



52 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

servants of the people, whose dignitaries should imitate the 
poverty, humility, the self-sacrifice of Christ, whose ministers 
should be the first to raise their voices on behalf of the poor and 
oppressed, whose aim should be to put an end to war and tyranny 
and needless suffering and to inaugurate the Kingdom of God upon 
earth — this no doubt was too noble an ideal for the sixteenth 
century to attain to, nor has the nineteenth realized it. But for all 
that, the life of Erasmus, though it went out in pain and anguish 
and gloom, amid the crash and storm of the Keformation conflict, 
was not a failure. The world would not listen to him then. It 
is Hstening now. 



LECTURE III. 



%it Wfx^tna^ More. 



'' It is unfortunate for More' s reputation that he has been adopted as the 
champion of a party and a cause which is arrayed in hostility to the liberties 
and constitution of his country. Apart from the partisan use which is m.ade of 
his name, we must rank him amongst the noblest minds of England, as one 
who became the victim of a tyrant whose policy he disapproved and whose servile 
instruments he despised."" — Mark Pattison. 

" Of all Tnen nearly perfect. Sir Thomas More had, perhaps, the clearest 
marks of individual character. His peculiarities, though distinguishing him^ 
from all others, were yet withheld from growing into moral faults. It is not 
enough to say of him. that he was unaffected, that he was natural, that he was 
simple ; so the larger part of truly great men have been. But there is something 
homespun in More which is common to him, with scarcely any other. This 
quality bound together his genius and learning, his eloquence and fame, with 
his homely and daily duties, bestowing a genuineness on all his good qualities* 
a dignity on the most ordinary offices of life, and an accessible familiarity on 
the virtues of a hero and a martyr, which silences every suspicion that his 
excellences were magnified.^'' — SiR James Mackintosh, 

*' One of the marvels of More was his infinite variety. He could write 
epigrams in a hair shirt at the Carthusian Convent ; and pass from translating 
Lucian to lecturing on Augustine at the Church of S. Lawrence. Devout 
almost to superstition, he was lighthearted almost to buffoonery. One hour we 
see him encouraging Erasmus in his love of Greek and the New Learning, or 
charming with his ready wit the supper-tables of the Court, or turning a debate 
in Parliament ; the next at home, surrounded by friends and familiar servants, 
by wife and children, and children's children, dwelling among them in an 
atmosphere of love and music, prayers and irony — throwing the rein, as it were, 
on the neck of his most careless fancies, and condescending to follow out the 
humours of his monkey and the fool. His fortune was almost as various. From 
his utter indifference to show and money, he must have been a strange successor 
to Wolsey. He had thought as little about fame as Shakspere; yet in the next 
generation it was an honour to an Englishman throughout Europe to be the 
countryman of More. ^^ — Edinburgh Review^ 1846. 



s^ 



LECTURE III. 



THOMAS MORE was born, it is now clearly established, 
in the year 1478, seven years after Machiavelli, five years 
before Luther. We shall perhaps be better able to understand 
him if we remember that two years before his birth William 
Caxton set up the first English printing press at Westminster, and 
that when he was a lad of fourteen Christopher Columbus set 
forth on his first voyage of discovery. More's father was a 
prosperous barrister, who afterwards became Sir John More, and 
a judge in the Court of King's Bench. He sent his son, after the 
custom of the time, to be brought up in the household of one of 
the great men of the day. Cardinal Morton, Archbishop of 
Canterbury, and prime minister to that royal miser, Henry VII. 
The Cardinal lives in some of our older histories as a financier 
and an extortioner, and especially as the witty inventor of ' Morton's 
fork.' It was part of his business to fleece as extensively as 
possible the merchants of London in order to swell the King's 
treasury. When they appeared before him to settle the amount 
of their taxes or loans, he would tell those who came richly attired, 
that as they were evidently wealthy they could afibrd to give 
largely ; while on the other hand, those who came meanly and 
poorly dressed, he accused of saving money, and made them pay 
handsomely also. Morton, however, deserves to be remembered 
as a generous benefactor of learning, and above all as having 
been the first to detect the extraordinary talents of young More. 
" Whosoever shall live to see it," he used to tell his guests, " this 
child waiting at table shall prove a rare and notable man." It 
was one of the pleasures of rich noblemen and prelates of that 
age, who recognised that wealth has its duties as well as its rights, 



56 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

to give to youths of great abilities and slender means, the oppor- 
tunity of becoming learned men. It was the generous support 
extended to him when poor by an English nobleman, Lord 
Mountjoy, which enabled Erasmus to become the leading scholar 
in Europe. Similarly, More was sent to Oxford at Cardinal 
Morton's expense. 

He found the University in the ferment of an intellectual 
revolution, caused by the teachings of scholars like Grocyn and 
•Colet, who were opening to eager students the treasures of Greek 
literature. As a consequence new doctrines in science, in pohtics, 
in religion, began to be preached, and the older teachers grew 
alarmed. They detested the new studies and charged the Greek 
students with heresy and infidelity. Like many foolish persons 
since, they appealed to the wisdom of their ancestors : what was 
good enough for their fathers was good enough for them. More 
ranged himself at once on the side of the New Learning, and 
became Colet's loyal and enthusiastic disciple. 

He was not allowed, however, to stay long at Oxford. His 
father, an orthodox person of the old school, anxious above all 
things for his son to become a successful barrister, took fright 
when he heard of the new-fangled dangerous Greek studies, and 
removed him to the law schools in London. Here More devoted 
himself to his profession, and rapidly came to the front. But he 
did not forget Erasmus and Colet, nor the New Learning, and so 
we find him at the age of twenty-three, lecturing on S. Augustine's 
'City of God' to an audience which included all the learned 
men of the time. 

The year 1504 saw him in Parliament, and at once an oppor- 
tunity was given of shewing what was the attitude of men of the 
New Learning to politics. That was the age, as every one knows, 
of slavish and subservient Parliaments, and this was the most sub- 
servient of all, controlled by the two ministers of Henry's avarice, 
Empson and Dudley. In 1504 the King was about to marry his 
eldest daughter to the Scottish King, and was legally entitled to 
demand from Parliament a grant of about £30,000. Instead of 
that, however, his ministers asked for a subsidy of £113,000; 
and the House of Commons, afraid to resist the extortion, was 



SIR THOMAS MORE. 57 

■about to pass the grant, when Thomas More, the youngest burgess 
in the House, rose in his place and delivered so eloquent and 
■energetic a protest, that when it came to a decision the King's 
demand was cut down to one-fourth of what he had asked. 
More's conduct was reported to the King by his officials, who 
informed him that all his plans had been defeated by a " beard- 
less boy." 

Those were not days when it was altogether safe to oppose the 
wishes of the sovereign, or to take a patriotic course in Parliament, 
and the ignoble King soon found means of punishment. He 
threw More's father into prison and compelled him to pay a fine, 
while More himself was obliged to retire from public life, and at 
one time seriously contemplated leaving the country. 

In his retirement, there came upon him again a longing, which 
had never left him, to follow the example of the saintliest Christians 
of the last five centuries and enter a monastery. There had 
always been two tendencies struggling for mastery within him — 
one the monkish, ascetic ideal of the Middle Ages — the other, 
the ideal of a freer, wider Christianity formulated by the men of 
the New Learning. At one time, accordingly, we find him deep 
in classical studies, writing stinging epigrams against tyranny, and 
perfecting himself in music, his passionate delight ; while shortly 
afterwards, it is recorded of him that he took lodgings near the 
Charterhouse, and subjected himself daily to the most painful 
austerities of the most severe of monks. It seemed exceedingly 
probable in the year 1505 that More would take upon himself 
religious vows and end his days in a monastery. He was saved 
from such a career, partly by the influence of his humanist friends, 
partly by finding that the religious orders were corrupt, and that 
the cloister was not the most favorable place in the world just 
then for a pious and useful life. 

When we next catch a glimpse of More, he is married, in full 
practice at the bar, with all monastic dreams thrown to the winds. 
His marriage deserves a word of notice. Those were the days of 
unromantic unions, and More's was no exception, but there is a 
touch of Quixotic chivalry about it which makes it interesting. 
The wife he chose was Jane Colt, the daughter of an Essex 



58 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

gentleman. Let me quote to you the account of the matter given 
by William Koper, his son-in-law, whose quaint simple, biography 
contains most of what we know concerning More. "Although," 
says Roper, " Master More's mind most served him to the second 
daughter of Mr. Colt, for that he thought her the fairest and best 
favoured ; yet when he considered that it would be both great grief 
and some shame also to the eldest to see her younger sister in 
marriage preferred before her, he then of a certain pity framed 
his fancy towards her and soon after married her." I presume that^ 
in spite of the lamentable lack of romance in this episode, there 
is a height of heroic virtue in it of which most of us do not feel 
ourselves capable. The marriage, however, proved an ideal one. 
More devoted himself tenderly to the young girl whom he had 
thus chosen, teaching her music and languages, making her the 
associate of his intellectual life ; and when, unhappily, she died in 
eai^y youth, he transferred his affection to their eldest daughter 
Margaret, destined thereafter to become one of the most celebrated 
women in Europe. 

His second marriage was entered into purely for the sake of his 
little children, and it would seem that, like Socrates before him, 
Richard Hooker and many another great man after him. More 
was unfortunate. Dame Alice Middleton, his second wife, appears 
from all descriptions to have been an exceedingly commonplace, 
stupid and worldly woman, in every way the exact opposite of her 
husband and admirably calculated to drive him to distraction and 
despair. More's sunny good nature, however, conquered every 
obstacle. Xo word of complaint ever escaped him. She was, he 
admits, " nee bella nee puella," but says Erasmus, " More lived 
with her on such terms of respect and kindness as if she had been 
both." William Roper tells us that he lived in the same house 
with More for sixteen years, and never once saw him in a temper, 
or heard him use a harsh or ungentle word. His home life, 
indeed, constitutes an ideal which has never been surpassed. 

When Henry VII. died, all obstacles to More's success in life 
vanished, and his rise in his profession became unprecedentedly 
rapid. He was engaged in every important case in the courts, 
earned an income of about £5,000 of our money, attracted the 



SIR THOMAS MORE. 59 

attention of the young King by winning a lawsuit for the Pope 
against him, was knighted and made a Privy Councillor, and con- 
stantly employed on embassies to the continent. These successes, 
however, were common to him with others. What was pecuHar to 
More was his view of the legal profession, which I am afraid even 
at this day would be denounced as Utopian and impossible. 
Nevertheless it remains true that in that far-off, barbarian century, 
the leading barrister in England laid down these three rules of 
conduct and kept them. Firstly, when people came to him eager 
to go to law with their adversaries, he invariably tried to induce 
them to settle their quarrels without an appeal to the law courts. 
One shudders to think of the fate of any unhappy lawyer of to-day 
who should venture upon conduct so entirely unprofessional. 
Secondly, he had so absurd and fantastic a notion of rectitude, 
that he would never undertake a cause of whose justice he was not 
beforehand thoroughly convinced. And, thirdly, he would never 
receive a farthing in fees from widows or orphans or poor people. 
There is enough, surely, in such conduct of a barrister to entitle 
him to the name of a social reformer, even if he had never written 
the ' Utopia.' 

And now let me turn to that most remarkable book of his, the 
first product of Renaissance free thought in the English language. 
The * Utopia' is a work which in our busy century, distracted as 
it is by an immense variety of intellectual interests, every one 
knows about and few people read. I respectfully submit to you 
that the ideas of a renowned scholar, of the most famous English 
man of letters of his generation, upon some of the most important 
questions of human life, ar6 worth perusal, even though they are 
nearly four centuries old. And for these reasons. Whatever 
other value the ' Utopia' may have, it is absolutely indispensable 
to the historical student as a revelation of the social condition of 
our country in early Tudor times. Next it is important as being 
the first fruits in EngHsh literature of that great revival of learnings 
of that new birth of knowledge, which makes the early sixteenth 
century the seed-time of modern civilization. You can trace in it 
also the marks of the wide difference which separates the Revival 
of Learning in Italy from the corresponding movement in our 



^o THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

own country. More was not the only scholar who put forth 
to the world at this period a treatise on government and the 
well-being of States. At the very time when he was preparing 
the ' Utopia,' another great thinker, MachiavelH of Florence, was 
€omposing that little book, ' The Prince,' which became the hand- 
book of kings and statesmen for a century. The contrast 
hetween these two is instructive. One discovers that whereas in 
Italy the revolt against the Middle Ages and theEevival of 
Learning meant Paganism in religion, utter degradation in morals, 
tyranny, craft and selfishness in statesmanship ; in England, 
through the influence of men like Erasmus and Colet and More, 
the Renaissance was Christian in its tendencies, filled with visions 
of a higher and nobler morality, fervently devoted to the cause of 
liberty and good government, and maintaining above all things 
that the sovereign exists for the people, not the people for the 
sovereign. Free thought in Italy produced only great learning 
and great license : in Engla.nd it took a religious form. Free 
thought in Italy, fed though it was on the best models of Greece 
and Eome, allied itself with tyranny and led to the Age of the 
Despots. Free thought in England produced not only the protest 
of More, but also the great rebellion of the seventeenth century 
against Stuart despotism. Furthermore, the ' Utopia' must take its 
place in literature amongst those speculative productions of the 
human mind of which Plato's ' Republic' is the first and greatest 
example. Practical Englishmen, to whom for the most part 
Providence has denied the gift of imagination, are inclined to 
regard such works with some degree of impatience and scorn. A 
great and honoured Englishman, for example, Mr. John Bright, 
told us some years ago, without any apparent bashfulness or 
shame, that the best part of Professor Jowett's translation of 
Plato's ' Republic' was the translator's excellent English, Plato's 
subject matter being considered almost worthless. However, in 
More's 'Utopia' there is comfort for us. He was a shrewd, hard- 
headed Englishman himself, and this work of his is differentiated 
entirely from all other ideal commonwealths by this — that it is 
not merely a picture of perfection, nor a speculation as to what 
might be if men were angels, but it also contains a practical 



S/J^ THOMAS MORE. 6r 

programme of reform in English society which, to a large extent, 
has been realized. Without doubt that is the peculiar interest of 
the ' Utopia,' that for two centuries we have been slowly, surely, 
approaching More's ideal and converting his dreams into accom- 
plished facts. Let me take one or two instances out of many. 
"We pride ourselves to-day — do we not? — a good deal on our 
enlightened measures to prevent increase of crime by good 
government and education. That idea is first found in More'& 
* Utopia.' He denounces the system of pure repression and brutal 
punishment. " If," he says, " you suffer your people to be ill 
educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy,, 
and then punish them for those crimes to which their first educa- 
tion disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but 
that you first make thieves and then punish them ? " 

Again, it has been one of the great social reformations of the 
nineteenth century that through the efforts of Sir Samuel Romilly, 
Sir James Mackintosh, and their co-workers, the barbarous 
criminal code, which punished nearly two hundred offences with 
death, has been abolished. It was not Sir Samuel Romilly, how- 
ever, but Sir Thomas More, three centuries ahead of his time, who 
first urged with passionate earnestness the plea that no man should 
be put to death for theft and other venial offences. " If, by the 
Mosaical law," argued More, "though it was rough and severe as- 
being laid upon a people obstinate and servile, men were only 
fined and not put to death for theft, we cannot imagine that in the 
new law of mercy, God has given us a greater license to cruelty 
than He did to the Jews. It is plain and obvious, that it is 
absurd and of ill consequence to the commonwealth, that a thief 
and a murderer should be equally punished. Extreme justice is 
extreme injury." 

Again, if there is one blessing more than another which we 
prize in this age, it is the privilege of every man to hold what 
religious belief seems best to himself, without persecution, without 
let or hindrance from any one. I do not say that the old bad spirit 
of persecution for religious opinions is entirely extinct, but at any 
rate it is ashamed of itself, and the power of imposing penalties 
upon one's neighbour for his differences of religious creed is 



62 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

rapidly disappearing. Now the very idea of toleration in religion, 
tliat great, prominent feature of modern life, was first given to 
England by Sir Thomas More. He is as much the original dis- 
coverer of it as Columbus was of the islands of America, or Sir 
Isaac Newton of the doctrine of gravitation. " The founder of 
Utopia," he tells us, " made a law that every man might be of 
what religion he pleased, and might endeavour to draw others to 
it by the force of argument and by amicable and modest ways, but 
without bitterness against those of other opinions." The history 
of toleration is but a commentary on those words of More's, and 
it may be doubted whether we have yet sufficiently honoured the 
noble genius and nobler heart of the man who, three hundred and 
seventy years ago, with the mental mists and darkness of the 
Middle Ages still about him, gave utterance to such a thought. 

Whatever faults it may have as a literary composition, the 
' Utopia ' is not deficient in humour. Like all the work both of 
Erasmus and More, it abounds in delicate irony, and quiet, 
sometimes almost imperceptible, satirical touches. No one who 
will read between the hues, and who knows anything of the history 
of the time, can possibly find it dull. Here are one or two instances 
taken at random. One of the chief evils of More's life was the 
number and corruption of the monks. " In Utopia," he writes 
gravely, " all the priests are men of eminent piety ; therefore, their 
number is few." There was a foolish rage in England in Henry's 
reign for jewels and precious stones for use in dress. " In Utopia," 
says More contemptuously, " they find pearls on their coast, dia- 
monds and carbuncles on their rocks ; with these they adorn their 
children, who are delighted with them and glory in them during 
their childhood ; but when they grow to years and see that none 
but children use such baubles, they, of their own accord, lay them 
aside, and would be as much ashamed to use them afterwards, as 
children among us, when they come to years, are of their puppets 
and other toys." Gold and silver, too, were despised in Utopia 
as metals of httle use, and, very significantly, were used to make 
fetters for slaves. Apparently, More had a poor opinion of the 
English field sports of his time, for he remarks that " among the 
Utopians all this business of hunting is turned over to their 



S/I? THOMAS MORE. 63 

butchers : and they look upon hunting as one of the basest parts 
of a butcher's work,'* 

Occasionally, More's satire is delightfully delicate, as when he 
tells us that in his imaginary State, no leagues, or treaties, or 
alliances are ever made with other nations, the Utopians having 
no behef in them. He then observes with a quiet chuckle, 
" Perhaps they would change their mind if they lived amongst 
us." He lived in an age of abominable and lying diplomacy, 
when neither King, nor Emperor, nor Pope could be trusted to 
keep his word a day longer than it profited him. This is More's 
way of striking a blow at the prevailing MachiavelHanism of the 
time. " We know," he says ironically, " how religiously treaties are 
observed in Europe, more particularly where the Christian doctrine 
is received, which is partly owing to the justice and goodness of the 
princes themselves, and partly to the reverence they pay to the 
Popes, who, as they are most religious observers of their own 
promises, so they exhort all other princes to perform theirs " — all 
of which was, as we know, the exact contrary of the actual 
fact. 

There is, unfortunately, no book yet printed which deals thor- 
oughly with the difficulties of the ' Utopia,' and possibly it may be 
useful, for those who intend to read it for themselves, to give one 
or two hints as to its interpretation. In the first place, then, we 
must remember that the glaring absurdities and occasional puer- 
ihties which it contains are purposely thrown in to give it the air 
of a romance, and to conceal its serious aims. Secondly, irony 
and satire predominate throughout, and sometimes More attributes 
to the Utopians bad and immoral customs actually prevailing in 
Europe. Dull readers say, how shocking! But More's latent 
argument is : these things are bad in these benighted pagans of 
Utopia; how much more to be condemned, then, amongst the 
Christians of Europe ! Thirdly, the one deadly heresy about the 
' Utopia,' the one absolute misunderstanding of it, is this : to 
believe that More was not in earnest — that his book has no real, 
serious meaning. We may recall, in this particular, some weighty 
words of Ruskin. " The entire purpose of a great thinker," he 
warns us in one of his books, " may be difficult to fathom, and we 



64 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

may be over and over again more or less mistaken in guessing at 
his meaning ; but the real, profound, nay, quite bottomless and 
unredeemable mistake, is the fool's thought: that he had no 
meaning." 

It would be impossible to describe accurately the institutions of 
More's ideal State in fewer words than he has used himself, but. 
roughly the main ideas of the Utopian Commonwealth are these. 
It is based on Communism, — not the Communism of Plato, but 
of the early Christian Church. Dean Hook held the strange and 
impossible view that the * Utopia ' was meant to be a satire 
against Communism ; but there cannot be the least doubt that^ 
in the abstract, as an ideal. More believed in Communism, and 
looked back longingly to the golden age of Christianity, when 
not one of the believers " said that aught of the things which he 
possessed was his own , but they had all things common." Com- 
munism in our time has a bad name, but it was realized con- 
stantly on a small scale in the monasteries of the Middle Ages, 
and flourishes to-day in several societies of the United States. 
There are even some amongst our great scholars and thinkers of 
the present age who, hke the Fathers, Ambrose and Chrysostom, 
believe that the dream of Christian Communism will yet be con- 
verted into deed. '' When modern individualism," says Eenan, 
" has borne its last fruits ; when humanity, dwarfed, dismal, shall 
return to great institutions and their strong discipline : when our 
paltry, shopkeeping society — I say rather when our world of 
pigmies — shall have been driven out with scourges by the heroic 
and idealistic portions of humanity, then life in common will be 
realized again." 

The objection, of course, the valid objection to Communism, is 
that it pre-supposes the death of human selfishness. More saw 
this clearly, and warns us that Communism is an institution of an 
ideal society. " There are many things in the Commonwealth of 
Utopia, that I rather wish than hope to see followed in our govern- 
ments. All things will not be well till all men are good, which 
will not be these many years." Nevertheless, he does not scruple 
to declare as an abstract doctrine, in the words of his traveler 
Raphael, " I am persuaded, that till property is taken away, there 



SIR THOMAS MORE. 65 

can be no equitable or just distribution of tilings, nor can the 
world be happily governed ; for as long as that is maintained, the 
greatest and the far best part of mankind will be still oppressed 
with a load of cares and anxieties. I confess, without taking it 
quite away, those pressures that lie on a great part of mankind 
may be made lighter ; but they can never be quite removed." 
Decidedly, I am afraid, whether we Hke it or not, we must believe 
that Sir Thomas More, in his abstract opinions, as also in his 
daily life, had strong leanings towards Communism. 

The leading principle in the ' Utopia ' may be taken to be this. 
It is a commonwealth in which the interests of the whole people are 
considered to he the first and only rule of the State. There are no 
leisured classes. All persons, even the magistrates themselves, 
and not omitting the women, labour with their hands. But the 
day's work is limited, not as Mr. Green has it in his History, to 
nine hours a day, but to six. It is objected to More that six 
hours labour per day would not produce sufficient to support the 
needs of humanity. It would be ample, he replied, if first of all, 
men would limit themselves to necessaries of existence and give 
up useless luxuries, and secondly, if there were no lazy people liv- 
ing on the labour of others. He then enumerates a list of the idle 
classes, which must be painful reading to some of us. "First," 
he says, " women generally do little, who are the half of mankind ; 
and if some few women are diligent, their husbands are idle.. 
Then consider the great company of idle priests, and of those that 
are called religious men ; add to those, all rich men, chiefly those 
that have estates in land, who are called noblemen and gentlemen, 
together with their families, i. e., servants, made up of idle persons, 
that are kept more for show than use." 

In very many ways, apart from Communistic dreams, one is 
obliged to admit the * Utopia ' presents an attractive picture, very 
largely because in so many matters it embodies the ideals which 
More carried out in his own life. Education is universal, free to 
all, and continued through life. Books and reading constitute 
one of the chief pleasures of the whole community. Asceticism 
is rejected, and the Utopians believe that all pure and honest 
pleasures are meant by God to be enjoyed. Labour is prevented 



66 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

from becoming monotonous by a constant change of occupation 
from craftsmanship to agriculture, from life in the country to 
life in the town. The greatest reverence is paid by the young to 
the old, the sick and suffering are diligently provided for, health 
is regarded as the highest earthly good, and ensured by careful 
measures of sanitation, and an attempt is made, in religious 
matters, to combine public worship in rites agreeable to all, with 
perfect liberty of conscience, and freedom to use in private any 
form of worship. 

It was only with great difficulty that such a man as the author 
of the ' Utopia ' was at last persuaded by Henry VIII. to enter 
his service. More hated Court life, and loved simplicity, but the 
Oxford Reformers had hope that the young and generous king 
would aid in their plans of good government in Church and State. 
There were no limits to Henry's admiration for More. Like every 
one else who knew him, he f .41 an easy victim to the charms of 
that fascinating personality. In spite of himself, More was drawn 
to the Court to give advice to Henry on state business, to talk on 
scholarship, astronomy, and theology, to keep the king and queen 
and courtiers in continuous laughter by his gaiety and wit. He 
loathed it all the time, and longed for his Chelsea home, his books, 
and his children. " He tried," says Erasmus, " as hard to keep 
out of court as most men do to get into it." It is notable that in 
order to escape from the company of kiugs and queens he had at 
last to suppress his mt and become like other folk. " When he 
perceived," says his biographer, " that he could not once in a 
month get leave to go home to his wife and children, he, much 
misliking this restraint of liberty, began thereupon somewhat to 
dissemble his nature, and so by little and little from his fom:er mirth 
to disuse himself, that he was of them fi-om thenceforth no more so 
ordinarily sent for." The king visited him at his house at Chelsea, 
nevertheless, heaped honours and offices upon him, making him 
Treasurer of the Exchequer and Chancellor of the Duchy of 
Lancaster, and not hesitating to astonish More's household by 
walking for an hour in the garden with his arm round his sub- 
ject's neck. William Roper congratulated his father-in-law upon 
his great good fortune. But Mure was under no delusions, and 



SIR THOMAS MORE. 67 

had already gauged the character of the king. " Son Roper," he 
said gravely, " I have no cause to be proud hereof. For if my 
head would win his Highness a castle in France, it should not fail 
to go off." 

In 1523, the King and Wolsey contrived to have More made 
Speaker of the House of Commons. It was a critical time, and 
there were heavy subsidies to be demanded from Parliament. 
Once again, however, he was found in opposition to the Tudor 
monarchy, and, so far from aiding Wolsey, led the House of 
Commons to victory. In vain Wolsey broke out wrathfiiUy, 
" Would to God, Master More, you had been at Rome when I 
made you speaker ! " " Your grace not offended," answered Sir 
Thomas coolly, " so would I too, my lord." He was an opponent 
whom no taunts nor insults could sting into retaliation. Differing 
at the Council table on one occasion from Wolsey on some 
question of foreign policy, the Cardinal called More " the veriest 
fool in all the King's Council." " God be thanked," answered 
More, with quiet irony but no trace of anger, " that his Majesty 
hath only one fool in his Council." 

There has come down to us a picture of the home life of More 
at this time, which is valuable both for what it tells us, and as a 
piece of hterature from a master hand. It is found in one of the 
epistles of Erasmus. " More has built," he says, " near London, 
upon the Thames, a modest yet commodious mansion. There he 
lives surrounded by his family, including his wife, his son and his 
son's wife, his three daughters and their husbands, and eleven 
grand-children. There is not any man living so affectionate as 
he ; and he loveth his old wife as if she were a girl of fifteen. In 
More's house, you would say that Plato's Academy was revived 
again, only whereas in the Academy the discussions turned upon 
geometry and the power of numbers, the house at Chelsea is a 
veritable school of Christian religion. In it is none, man or 
woman, but readeth or studieth the liberal arts, yet is their chief 
care of piety. There is never any seen idle. The head of the house 
governs it not by a lofty carriage and oft rebukes, but by gentle- 
ness and amiable manners. Every member is busy in his place, 
performing his duty with alacrity, nor is sober mirth wanting." 



68 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

In 1529, on Wolsey's fall, More, much against his will, became 
Lord Chancellor of England. It was not long, however, before he 
found that there was the widest possible divergence of views 
between Henry and himself upon the all-important subject of the 
day, the divorce from Catherine of Arragon. In this matter the 
King had hoped to have the support of More's great authority 
upon his side, and was bitterly disappointed at the attitude of his 
Chancellor, who firmly declined in any shape or form to 
countenance the divorce. More had two reasons. He beheved it 
to be a gross injustice in itself, and furthermore he distrusted the 
Protestant reformers, and would lend no aid to the destruction of 
the Papal supremacy. With the King's consent he laid down his 
office and went into retirement. He had entered Henry's service 
a rich man : he left it without rewards of any kind, with an 
income of £100 a year. The clergy, out of gratitude for the fierce 
and violent books which More had written against the Protestants 
of England and Germany, voted him a grant of £5,000. He 
declined it, saying that he would rather see it all cast into the 
Thames. He wanted neither riches nor honours, only rest and 
peace. 

The crisis of Sir Thomas More's life arrived when in the year 
1533, Henry VIIL, impatient of long years of delay in lawsuits 
and Papal negotiations, cut the Gordian knot by marrying Anne 
Boleyn, and in the teeth of all Europe proclaiming her as lawful 
Queen of England. On January 25, Anne Boleyn gained the 
object of her selfish ambition, and was secretly married to the 
King. On the 23d of May, Thomas Cranmer, but lately created 
Archbishop of Canterbury, with that ignoble subservience to his 
sovereign which was the worst stain on his character, pronounced 
sentence of divorce against Queen Catherine, and a week later 
her rival was crowned at Westminster with magnificent pomp and 
pageantry, such as England had never witnessed before. An 
invitation to be present had been sent to the ex-Lord Chancellor, 
together with a present of £20 to buy him a Court dress, he being 
now reduced to poverty. More firmly refused, and thereby signed 
his own death-warrant, as he knew. Henceforth he was a marked 
and doomed man. The minister who now ruled both England 



SIR THOMAS MORE. 69 

and Henry with a rod of iron was Thomas Cromwell, still the 
unsolved riddle of Tudor history : a man of kindly temperament 
in private life, but in government the Archfiend of Tyranny, a 
faithful disciple of Machiavelli, cool, passionless, indomitable, 
bent upon building up in England an absolute monarchy, and upon 
making his sovereigns supreme in Church and State. It was with 
an unerring instinct that the King and minister perceived that 
the most formidable foe they had in England in their absolutist 
designs was Sir Thomas More. Quietly and calmly, he had with- 
drawn himself from their plans, but that was not enough. In 
every country of Europe his name was famous. In England he 
was respected and reverenced universally, and even his silent 
opposition w^as dangerous to the government. Cromwell in singHng 
out the victims of his policy invariably pursued the same method : 
he let the weak and the inconsiderable and the mean go free, and 
struck at the greatest and the noblest, the leaders of men. So it 
happened that one of the first sufierers under the English Reign 
of Terror was Sir Thomas More. 

I will not weary you by tracing out the various devices which 
were used to betray the noblest of Englishmen to his death. One 
or two examples must suffice. His enemies were foolish enough 
in their malice to charge the purest judge the nation had possessed 
for two centuries with receiving bribes and presents from suitors 
in his court. An inquiry was held, and every accusation was 
triumphantly refuted. It was proved beyond doubt that, after 
the evil custom of the time, persons who had gained favourable 
verdicts at his hand, had presented him with valuable gifts. It 
was also proved that Sir Thomas More, unlike his fellow-judges, 
had returned them every one. Next, an unsuccessfiil endeavour 
was made to implicate him in the treasonable speeches of the 
Romanist prophetess, EHzabeth Barton, the Nun of Kent. 
Parliament passed an Act of Attainder against her, and the King 
had determined that More should be included as one of her 
accomplices ; but the charge was so false and monstrous, that his 
own ministers on their knees persuaded him to omit More's name, 
assuring him that the House of Lords would never find him 
guilty. Threats and persuasions alike were tried with the late 



70 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

Chancellor, but all in vain. Almost alone in that immoral age, 
More allowed himself the luxury of a conscience, and he was 
steadfastly resolved never at the bidding of a tyrant king to declare 
that to be right which he knew to be wrong. He looked death in 
the face and calmly made his decision, smihng when the Duke of 
Norfolk, alarmed at his danger, gave him a friendly hint. " By 
the mass, Mr. More," the Duke had said, " it is perilous striving 
with Princes, and therefore I would wish you to incline to the 
King's pleasure. The anger of a monarch means death." " Is 
that all, my lord?" More replied ; "then there is no more differ- 
ence between your grace and me but that I shall die to-day and 
you to-morrow." The resources of tyranny, however, were not 
exhausted, and Cromwell had more dangerous weapons to use than 
these. In 1534 there was passed an Act of Succession, excluding 
the Princess Mary from the throne, declaring Anne Boleyn Queen, 
and settling the crown upon her children. In itself that statute 
was powerless to hurt More, who acknowledged fuUy, as a loyal 
Englishman, the right of Parliament to determine the succession. 
But by another provision of the same statute, manifestly aimed at 
More and those who believed as he did, the King was empowered 
to administer to any subject in the reahn an oath which declared 
his marriage with Catherine of Arragon to have been against 
Scripture and invalid from the beginning. It was well known 
that More could] take no such oath. But on April 13, 1534, while 
at Chelsea, he was summoned by Cranmer to appear at Lambeth 
and receive it. There was a sharp, short struggle. More was no 
ambitious candidate for the honours of martyrdom, and there were 
reasons enough, in his sweet home life at Chelsea, amidst his 
children and grandchildren, his books and his friends, with 
Margaret Koper, the true and perfect ideal of English woman- 
hood, ever at his side, and the great Erasmus and half the learned 
men of Europe for his intellectual companions — reasons enough, 
surely, to make him hesitate. Why should he not do what 
bishops and nobles had not disdained to do, and earn peace and 
rest by going through a mere form of words? The King, 
he knew, would prevail in the end. Why should he maintain, 
singlehanded, a hopeless opposition ? No such pleadings had any 



SIR THOMAS MORE. 71 

weight with More. " Never," said Erasmus, " did Nature mould 
a temper more gentle, endearing, and happy than the temper of 
Thomas More." It was true, but it was also true that never 
since the days when King Alfred the Truth-teller reigned in Eng- 
land, had there been an Englishman endowed with a stronger will 
and more indomitable spirit. Beneath all his laughter and gaiety, 
there lurked an iron determination and the courage of a martyr. 
The struggle within him was soon over, and in the end life and 
love and happiness seemed less precious than honour and duty 
and a manful struggle against unlawful tyranny. Let me read to 
you William Roper's touching account of this mental conflict. He 
was with him at Chelsea when the summons came. " Whereas," 
he says, " Sir Thomas More used evermore at his departure from 
his house and children (whom he loved tenderly) to have them 
bring him to his boat, and there to kiss them all and bid them 
farewell, at this time would he suffer none of them forth of the 
gate to follow him, but pulled the wicket after him, and shut them 
all from him, and with a heavy heart (as by his countenance it 
appeared) with me and our four servants then took his boat 
towards Lambeth. Wherein sitting still sadly awhile, at the 
last he rounded me in the ear and said, ' Son Roper, I thank our 
Lord, the field is won.' " 

At Lambeth More remained resolute. He would obey the laws, 
he said, and acknowledge the succession, but he could not perjure 
himself by taking the oath, which contained matter that he did not 
believe. In vain Cranmer plied him with arguments and subtle 
distinctions. He finally declined to obey, and was committed to 
the Tower. 

There he remained for a whole year in harsh and severe impris- 
onment, surrounded by spies, who endeavoured to entrap him in 
treasonable words, troubled somewhat by the complaints and 
commonplace pleadings of his worldly wife. Dame Alice. She 
" marvelled," she said, " that he who had always hitherto been 
taken for so wise a man, should now so play the fool as to lie in a 
close, filthy prison, when he might be abroad at his liberty, in 
favour with King and Council, if he would but do as all the Bishops 
and best learned of the realm had done." There was one, 



72 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

however, whose pure nature and lofty soul could understand that a 
noble man might value his life less than a conscience free from 
blame ; and amid his long, weary imprisonment. More was con- 
stantly cheered and encouraged in his resolution by her who would 
gladly have laid down her life for his, his daughter Margaret. 

At last, in May, 1535, he was placed on his trial at Westminster, 
charged with new treasons in having denied the King's title as 
Supreme Read of the Church. New weapons for the removal of 
opponents had now been placed in the hands of the King and 
Cromwell. Not only had Henry been declared Head of the 
Church, but Parliament had passed an outrageous law inflicting 
all the penalties of high treason upon any person who should deny 
any of his titles, and the lawyers had twisted this to mean that 
positive guilt need not be proved. If a man refused to answer 
official questions concerning his belief about the Supremacy, that 
was sufficient. Even Mr. Froude, who is not particular about 
strong measures, apologizes for this infamous statute, and admits 
that it bordered upon oppression. I dwell upon it because it is 
important to notice exactly what it was that More declined to do 
and for what cause he was put to death. It is usually said that he 
was executed because he denied the King's Supremacy. It would 
be more accurate to say that he died because he refused to answer 
questions as to his private belief on the matter. He scrupulously 
avoided writing or speaking against the Act of Supremacy. He 
was put to death for keeping silence. 

The details of his trial need not concern us. It was, perhaps, 
the worst of the judicial murders of Henry's reign. The result 
was a foregone conclusion. The prosecutors for the Crown were 
themselves the witnesses. The only shred of evidence against 
More was given by Solicitor-General Eich, a man of bad life 
and character. The jury, notwithstanding, after fifteen minutes 
deliberation, found More guilty, and he was condemned to death. 
Lord Chancellor Audley intimating that the King, out of his 
gracious favour to him, had been pleased to change the usual 
punishment for treason to beheading. " God forbid," said More, 
with the wit that never failed him, " that the King should shew 
any more such mercy unto any of my friends ; and God preserve 



SIR THOMAS MORE. 73 

my posterity from all such pardons." No words of bitterness or 
condemnation against tlie men who had just consigned him to 
death escaped him, and with a smile he took farewell of his 
judges. " My lords," he said, " I verily trust that though your 
lordships have been on earth judges to my condemnation, we 
may yet hereafter in heaven meet merrily together to our ever- 
lasting salvation. God preserve you all, especially my sovereign 
lord the King, and send him faithful councillors." 

A harder trial awaited him. As he landed at the Tower Wharf, 
his daughter Margaret, who had watched for him there to take her 
last farewell, without care for herself thrust aside the weapons of 
the guards and fell at her father's feet asking his blessing. " The 
beholding whereof," says Eoper, " was to many of them that were 
present thereat so lamentable, that it made them for very sorrow 
to mourn and to weep." For More, when his daughter at last 
was constrained to leave him, the bitterness of death was past. 

A week later they led him forth to die. The imprisonment in 
the Tower had done its work. His hair was now sprinkled with 
grey, his body emaciated, and it] was with difficulty that he walked 
to the place of execution. No physical weakness, however, could 
bend his lofty spirit nor mar the splendid courage with which he 
met his death. Historians have wondered at the extraordinary 
composure which he displayed, and some have censured his levity. 
The truth is that to no Englishman who ever lived did the change 
from life to death seem so slight as to Sir Thomas More. " His 
death," it has been well said by Addison, " was of a piece with his 
life. There was nothing in it new, forced, or affected. The 
innocent mirth which had been so conspicuous in his life did not 
forsake him to the last." 

As he placed his foot upon the ladder, the scaffold, which had 
been badly put together, shook and seemed hkely to fall. More 
turned with a smile to his friend. Sir William Kingston, the 
Lieutenant of the Tower. " Master Lieutenant," he said, perhaps 
with a kindly intention to cheer his friend, " I pray you see me 
safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself." The 
executioner begged his forgiveness. " Thou art about to do me," 
said More, " a greater service this day than ever any mortal man 



74 THE OXFORD REFORMERS, 

can give me," Then, having declared to the people that he died 
in the faith of the Holy Catholic Church and a faithful servant to 
God and the king, he repeated the Miserere Psalm, and binding a 
cloth over his eyes, knelt at the block. The headsman was about 
to strike, when More signed to him to delay while he removed his 
beard. " Pity," he murmured, not in levity but saddest irony, 
" pity that should be cut which never committed treason." 

" With which strange words," writes Mr. Froude, compelled for 
once to be generous, " the strangest perhaps ever uttered at such 
a time, the lips most famous through Europe for eloquence and 

wisdom closed forever Something of his calmness may 

have been due to his natural temperament, something to an 
unaffected weariness of a world which in his eyes was plunging 
into the ruin of the latter days. But those fair hues of sunny 
cheerfulness caught their colour from the simplicity of his faith ; 
and never was there a Christian's victory over death more grandly 
evidenced than in that last scene lighted with its lambent 
humour." 

Beautiful, surely, this Hfe. Beautiful, this joyous death. But 
it is not for those things only that I have ventured to commend 
Sir Thomas More's history to your notice. It is this noble book 
of his, this ' Utopia,' deserving, if ever volume did, John Milton's 
description of a good book, " the precious life-blood of a master- 
spirit, embalmed and treasured up to a Hfe beyond life," which 
constitutes in this age More's chief claim to our regard. We live 
in a time when humanity is throbbing with new ideals and new 
aspirations, when especially one fresh hope animates the world, 
that in the near fiiture the hard lot of the suffering, patient 
millions who bear the burden of the earth's toil shall be amelio- 
rated. We are not worthy to Kve in our generation — I dare to 
say it — if we have no share in this hope. We are no true stu- 
dents of the Extension movement if in some degree we do not 
share the enthusiasm and the spirit of Sir Thomas More. This 
movement of ours — let us openly proclaim what many of you have 
discovered already — is in its essence a movement for Social 
Reform. That does not mean that it need create apprehension in 
the mind of any one. We are no Revolutionists. We have no 



SIR THOMAS MORE. 75 

party politics to propagate. There are no valued institutions of 
our country which we wish to assail. We give allegiance to no 
Socialism except the SociaHsm of Jesus Christ. We do not believe 
that Christianity is an exploded myth. Our methods in their 
degree are the methods of the Oxford Reformers — of Colet and 
Erasmus and More. What we care about mainly is that the best 
gifts of God shall be scattered broadcast amongst the people ; that 
culture and knowledge and exalted ideals shall spread from the 
few to the many ; that " no man shall die ignorant to whom God 
has given the capacity for knowledge ; " that the great cities shall 
not long continue the scandal and the shame alike of our Religion 
and our Humanity. 

" Oh ! why, and for what, are we waiting, while our brothers droop 

and die. 
And on every wind of the heavens a wasted life goes by f 

How long shall they reproach us, where crowd on crowd they 

dwell, 
Poor ghosts of the wicked city, the gold-crushed, hungry hell ! 

*X* ^ ^ ^I^ ^I^ ^t^ 

They are gone ! There is none can undo it, nor save our souls 

from the curse ; 
But many a million cometh, and shall they be better, or worse f " 



Sloths mt^ Sllustir^tions. 



(a) — Contemporaries of the Oxford Reformers (1466— 1536). 



Richard III. 
Henry VIII. 
Francis I. . 
Charles V. 
Alexander VI 
LeoX. . . 
Columbus . 
Copernicus 
Gutenberg . 
Caxton . . 



. 1452— 1485. 
. 1491— 1547. 
. 1494— 1547. 
. 1500— 1558. 
. 1431-1503. 
. 1475— 1523. 

• 1435— 1506. 

• 1473—1543- 
. 1410 — 1468. 
. 1422 — 1491. 



Savonarola ..... 1452 — 1498. 
Michael Angelo . . . 1475 — ^S^4- 

Raphael 1483 — 1520. 

Machiavelli 1469 — 1527. 

Pico della Mirandola . 1463 — 1494. 

Rabelais 1495— 1553- 

Luther 1483 — 1546. 

Zwingle 1484 — 1531. 

Tyndale ...... 1484— 1536. 

Loyola 1491 — 1556. 



{6) — Historical Events during Colet's Lifetime. 

Battle of Tewkesbury 147 1 

Death of Charles the Bold 1477 

Battle of Bosworth 1485, 

Spaniards enter Grenada 1492 

Columbus discovers S. Salvador 1492 

Charles VIII. invades Italy 1494 

Cabot discovers coast of North America .... 1497. 

Execution of Savonarola 1498 

Leo X. becomes Pope 1513 

Luther writes his Wittenberg theses 1517 



(<:)— The Revival of Learning in England. 

" It is never among the people who give birth to new ideas that those ideas 
attain to their healthiest development. The new thought takes possession of 
them too exclusively, and quickens one side of their nature into too one-sided 
a life. So it had been in the early Middle Ages with the monasticism of the 
East. So it was when the Middle Ages drew to a close with the Humanism 
of Italy. What Benedict of Nursia was to Simeon Stylites, Colet and More 



THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 77 

were to Pulci and Machiavelli. The Italians had before them the lees of 
Mediaeval Christianity in their foulest corruption. Their reverence for 
humanity grew to be mere pampering of the intellect or of the senses. In 
England, as the evil was less intense, the reaction was less intense also. The 
old Church life lived on in the words of Colet, interpenetrated with a new 
spirit of inquiry and a new longing for a reign of justice rather than for self- 
mortification." 

S. R. Gardiner. 

{d) — Colet's Programme for Reform in the Church. 

" Let those lawes be rehersed that do warne you fathers that ye put not 
over soone your hands on every man, or admitte into holy orders. . . . Let 
the lawes be rehersed that commande that benefices of the church be gyven to 
those that are worthy ; and that promotions be made in the churche by the 
ryghte balance of vertue, not by carnall affection : whereby this happeneth 
nowe-a days that boyes for olde men, fooles for wise men, euyll for good, 
do reigne and rule. . . . Let the lawes be rehersed that warreth against 
the spot of Symonie . . . that commande personall residence of curates 
in theyre churches . . . that command that the goodes of the church be 
spent, nat in costly byldyng, nat in sumptuous apparrell and pompis, nat in 
feastyng and bankettynge, nat in excesse and wantonnes, nat in enrichinge 
of kynsfolke, nat in kepynge of dogges, but in things profitable and necessary 
to the churche . , . Let the lawes be rehersed of the residence of bysshops 
in theyr diocesis ; that commande that they loke diligently, and take hede to 
the helthe of soules ; that they shew themselves in their churches at the leest 
on greatte holye-dayes ; that they here the causes and matters of poure men ; 
that they sustein fatherles children and widowes; that they exercise them 
selfe in workes of virtue." 

Convocation Sermon of 15 12. 

(^)— Colet and S. Paul's School. 

*' I pray God all may be to his honour, and to the erudicyon and profyt 
of chyldren my countrie-men, Londoners specyally, whome dygestynge this 
lytel werke I had alwaye before mine eyen, consyderinge more what was for 
them than to shewe any grete connynge, wyllyng to speke the thynges often 
before spoken in suche maner as gladly yonge begynners and tender wittes 
myght take and conceyue. Wherefore I pray you, al lytel babys, al lytel 
children, lerne gladly this lytel treatise, and coramende it dylygently vnto 
your memoryes. Trustynge of this begynninge that ye shal procede and 
growe to parfyt lyterature, and come at last to be gret clarkes. And lyfte vp 
your lytel whyte hands for me, which prayeth for you to God. To whom 
be al honour and imperyal maieste and glory. Amen." 

' A lytell proheme to the boke ' (Colet's Accidence.) 



78 THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

(/) — The Chief Works of Erasmus. 

Enchiridion Militis Christiani . 1503. Adagia 1500 — 1520. 

Praise of Folly 1510. Institutio Principis Christiani . .1516, 

Novum Instrumentum . . . .1516. Paraphraseof the New Testament 15 19. 

Treatise on Free- Will . , . .1524. Familiar Colloquies . . . 15 19 — 1530. 
"Desiderius Erasmus. Auctor damnatus. Opera omnia Erasmi caute 
legenda, tarn multa enim insunt correctione digna ut vix omnia expurgari 
possint. " * Index Expurgatorius . ' 

[g) — Erasmus on War. 

" Oh ! that God would be merciful and still this storm which is raging 
in the Christian world. We are worse than the dumb animals, for among 
them it is only the wild beasts that wage war, and that with the weapons 
with which nature has furnished them ; not as we do with machines invented 
by the art of the devil. Can we who glory in the name of Christ, whose 
precepts and example taught us only gentleness, think anything in this world 
of such value that it should provoke us to war ? — a thing so ruinous, so 
hateful, that even when it is most just, no truly good man can approve of 
it, carried on as it is by homicides, gamblers, scoundrels of every kind, 
by the lowest class of hirelings, who care more for a little gain than tor 
their lives." Ep. to Anthony ^ Bergis, 15 14. 

{h) — His Attack on Regal Tyranny. 

" Princes should be chosen, not taken at random, as they are now : the 
result being that the people build cities, princes destroy them ; the industry 
of citizens enriches the state, which the princes' rapacity plunders ; popular 
magistrates enact good laws for kings to break ; the people love peace, and 
their rulers stir up war." ' Adagia.' 

[i) — His Theory of the Papacy. 

" The Roman Pontiff is the chief herald of the Gospel, as other bishops 
are his heralds. All bishops are vicegerents of Christ, but among them the 
Roman Pontiff is pre-eminent. But they are his worst enemies who ascribe 
to him, in order to flatter him, an authority which he himself does not claim, 
and which it is not for the advantage of the Christian flock that he should 
possess." Ep. to Archbishop of Mairtz, 15 19. 

{j) — His Hatred of Dogma. 

" Let us have done with theological refinements. A man is not lost 
because he cannot tell whether the Spirit has one principle or two. Has he 
the fruits of the Spirit? That is the question. Is he patient, kind, good, 
gentle, modest, temperate, chaste? Inquire if you will, but do not define. 
True religion is peace, and we cannot have peace unless we leave the 
conscience unshackled on obscure points on which certainty is impossible." 

Ep. to Arch, of Palermo, 1523. 



THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 79 

iji) — His Relations to Luther and the Reformation. 

" I neither approve Luther nor condemn him. If he is innocent, he 
ought not to be oppressed by the factions of the wicked ; if he is in error, 
he should be answered, not destroyed. The theologians do not try to answer 
him. They do but raise an insane and senseless clamour, and shriek and 
curse." Ep. to the Prince Elector Albert, 15 19. 

"As to your advice that I should join Luther, there will be no difficulty 
about that, should I find him on the side of the Catholic Church. But if 
matters shall come to extremities, and a revolution take place, by which 
the Church shall be made to totter on her throne, I will in the meantime 
anchor myself to that solid rock until it shall become clear on the restoration 
of peace where the Church is, and wherever there is evangelical peace there 
will Erasmus be found." Letter of 1521, 

" I am ready to be a martyr for Christ, if He give me strength to do so; 
but I have no wish to be a martyr for Luther." 

Ep. to Ulric von Hutten, 1523. 

" My aim is the advancement of literature, and a pure simple theology. 
I ask not whether Luther approve or not ; Luther and this generation shall 
pass away, but Christ abideth for ever." Answer to Hutten, 1523, 

(/) — Erasmus' Estimate of More. 

" If you want a perfect pattern of real friendship, you must look for it 
in More. He has so much affability, and suavity of manner, that there is no 
one, however morose may be his disposition, whom he does not make 
cheerful. . . There is nothing in the world, however serious it may be, 
from which he does not extract pleasantry. If he has intercourse with wise 
and learned men, he is delighted with their genius ; if with unlearned and 
foolish men, he enjoys their folly. . . No one is less swayed by the 
opinions of the world, and no one is more remarkable for common sense. 
. . From early life he has loved the pursuit of letters. . . He is alto- 
gether without pride, and in the midst of weighty affairs of State he remem- 
bers his old friends, and returns to his beloved literature. . . John Colet, 
a man of shrewdness and accurate judgment, says of him in conversation, 
that there is but one genius in England, and that his name is Thomas More. 
He is a man of real piety, very remote from all superstition. He converses 
in such a manner with his friends respecting the world to come, that you see 
at once that he has a hope full of immortality," 

Letter to Ulric von Hutten, 1519, 

{m) — More's Attack on the Social Conditions of his Time. 

" Is not this an vniust and an unkynde publyke weale, whyche gyueth 
great fees and rewardes to gentlemen, as they call them, and to gold smythes, 



8o THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 

and to suche other, whiche be either ydle persones, or els onlye flatterers, 
and deuysers of vain pleasures : And of the contrary parte maketh no gentle 
prouision for poore ploumen, coliars, laborers, carters, yronsmythes, and 
carpenters : without whome no commen wealthe can contineue ? But after it 
hath abused the labours of theire lusty and glowing age, at the laste when 
they be oppressed with olde age and sickenes : being nedye, poore, and 
indigent of all things, then forgetting theire so manye and so greate benefits 
recompenseth and acquyteth them moste vnkyndly with miserable death. 
And yet besides this the riche men not only by private fraud, but also by 
commen lawes, do euery day pluck and snatche awaye from the poor some 
part of their daily lining. . . Therefore when I consider and way in my 
mind all these commen wealthes, which now a dayes any where do flourish, 
so God helpe me, I can perceaue nothing but a certein conspiracy of riche 
men procuringe their owne commodities vnder the name and title of the 
common wealth." ' Utopia.' 

in) — Satire of the • Utopia.' 

" In Utopia all the priests are of exceeding holiness, and therefore their 
number is but few." 

** Furthermore, they utterly exclude and banish all attorneys, proctors, 
and sergeants at the law, which craftily handle matters and subtilly dispute 
of the laws. For they think it most meet that every man should plead his 
own matter, and tell the same tale before the judge that he would tell to his 
man of law." 

" Princely virtue, which like as it is of much higher majesty than poor 
folks' virtue, so also it is of much more liberty, as to the which nothing is 
unlawful that it lusteth after." 

" They gather pearls by the seaside, and diamonds and carbuncles upon 
certain rocks, and with these they deck their young infants, which when they 
be grown in years do lay them by, perceiving that none but children do wear 
such toys and trifles." 

"They count hunting the lowest, the vilest, and most abject part of 
butchery, and the other parts of it more profitable, and most honest, as 
bringing much more commodity, in that they kill beasts only for necessity." 

" They hire soldiers from all places, but chiefly from the Zapoletse (Swiss), 
a hardy race, born only for war, ready to serve any prince that will hire 
them, in great numbers. They know none of the arts of life except how to 
take it away. They serve their employers actively and faithfully . . . but 
they will change sides for the advance of a halfpenny. As the Utopians 
look out for good men for their own use at home, they employ the greatest 
scoundrels abroad : and they think they do a great service to mankind by thus 
ridding the world of the entire scum of such a foul and nefarious population." 

' Utopia,' Book II. 



THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 8i 

{o) — Doctrines of Religious Toleration in the ' Utopia.' 

" This is one of the ancientest laws among them : that no man shall be 
blamed for reasoning in the maintenance of his own religion. For King 
Utopus, even at the first beginning, hearing that the inhabitants of the land 
were, before his coming thither, at continual dissension and strife among 
themselves for their religions : first of all, made a decree that it should be 
lawful for every man to favour and follow what religion he would, and that 
he might do the best he could to bring others to his opinion, so that he did 
it peaceably, gently, quietly, and soberly, v/ithout hasty and contentious 
i-ebuking and inveighing against other. If he could not by fair and gentle 
speech induce them into his opinion, yet he should use no kind of violence, 
and refrain from displeasant and seditious words. . . . Therefore he gave to 
every man free liberty and choice to believe what he would, saving that he 
earnestly charged them that no man should conceive so vile and base an 
opinion of the dignity of man's nature, as to think that the souls do die and 
perish with the bodies. . . . He that is thus minded is deprived of all 
honours, excluded from all common administrations in the weal public. . . . 
Howbeit they put him to no punishment, because they be persuaded, that it 
is no man's power to believe what he list." 



Book$. 



{a) — Text Books. 

i. F. Seebohm's Oxford Reformers. (Longmans.) 
ii. " Era of the Protestant Revolution. (Longmans.) 

iii. Green's Short History of the English People. (Macmillan.) 
iv. More's Utopia, edited by J. R. Lumby. (Cambridge Press. ) 
V. Life of Erasmus, by Rev. A. R. Pennington. (Seeley.) 

{b) — Biographies. 

i. Life of John Colet, by Rev. J. H. Lupton. (Bell & Sons.) 

Lives of Vitrarius and Colet, by Erasmus, edited by Lupton. 

Life, by Dr. S. Knight. (Oxford, 1823.) 
ii. Life and Character of Erasmus, by R. B. Drummond. 2 vols. 1873. 

Jortin's Life of Erasmus. 2 vols. 1758. 
iii. Roper's Life of More (included in Lumby's edition of the Utopia). 

Cresacre More's Life of More. 1627. 

Stapleton's Tres Thomse. 1588. 

Life by Sir James Macintosh. 1844. 

Life by Father Bridgett, S. J., 1891. 

{c) — Essays. 

i. Articles on More and Erasmus in Encyclopsedia Britannica, by 

M. Pattison. 
ii. Essay on Erasmus, by Milman. 
iii. Times of Erasmus and Luther, by J. A. Froude. (Short Studies. 

Vol. I). 
iv. Erasmus. Oxford Prize Essay, by A. L. Smith. 

(^)_WORKS. 

i. Colet's lectures have been edited by Mr. Lupton. 

The Convocation sermon is printed in Blunt's History of the 
Reformation, Vol. i. 



THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 83 

ii. Works of Erasmus, edited by Le Clerc. lo vols. 1703. 

The ' Praise of Folly,' and the * Colloquies ' can be read in English 

translations. 
The most important of the Epistles of Erasmus are translated in 
Drummonri's Life, 
iii. More's Collected Works. 1689. 

Utopia. Best reprint is Arber's. 1869. 

{e) — Histories and Books of Reference. 

i. Brewer's Reign of Henry VIII. 2 vols. 1884. 

ii. Froude's History of England. Vols, i., Ii. 
iii. Dixon's History of the Reformation, 
iv. Hibbert Lectures for 1883, by Dr. C. Beard. 

V. Symonds' Renaissance in Italy, 
vi. Lingard's History of England, 
vii. Nisard. Etudes sur la Renaissance, 
viu. Niccold Machiavelli and his Times. Pasquale Villari. 
ix. Villari' s Life of Savonarola. 

X. Kostlin's Life of Luther. 



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